American Aesthetics

This volume brings together a selection of papers read at the2006 Geneva conference on "American Aesthetics." Contributors address the question of how, from our contemporary perspective, the heavily-theorized historical category of the aesthetic can be used. The investment of American writers and thinkers in the concept of the aesthetic, from the eigh-teenth century to the present, is discussed from a diversity of positions ranging from the colonial American novel, through the work of such canonical writers as Emerson and Thoreau, to contemporary "minority" ethnic and feminist texts.Indeed, the notion of "minor" literatures is interrogated here. In these essays contributors ask how the recent critical move away from the canon, from American Literature to American literatures, shapes our understanding of aesthetic issues. While the focus is on American cultural production, the primary intellectual contexts of the book are provided by the rise of Enlightenment aesthetic theory and the so-called "crisis of representation" that is Modernity.