Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

“This is an excellent collection of essays by some of the most interesting scholars working early modern studies today. The essays collected here demonstrate why the aesthetic remains a fundamental topic of critical inquiry for early modern studies. Extending well beyond formalist analysis with which it is most often associated, this volume helps us understand how the aesthetic is foundational to any understanding of social being, political community, and the environment.” —Graham Hammill, author of The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton
 

“Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare inaugurates a much-needed reconsideration of aesthetics in early modern literature. Rejecting an assumption that has prevailed in the study of Shakespeare for nearly four decades—that the aesthetic has to be rejected or overcome to arrive at the political and historical—this collection promises a refreshing new critical direction for the study of Renaissance literature.” —Christopher Warley, author of Reading Class Through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton
 

“This terrific collection puts into dialogue two categories—aesthetics and politics—that are often treated as opposites in literary studies. In probing the 'intricate complicity' of these categories in the early modern period, this book provides a conversation of the best kind: provocative, rigorous, punctuated by independent perspectives, and characterized throughout by a sense of social ethics that illuminates from within literary questions so that they matter afresh.” —Rachel Eisendrath, author of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis.

“We will be a long time yet working out the relationship between the terms “politics” and “aesthetics,” and the areas of experience, allied or inimical, that they have come to name. This collection offers us a longer history of the problem than is sometimes recognized, and a series of new, surprising perspectives: those of a distinguished group of scholars, and of many-minded William Shakespeare, across his career, his sources, and his afterlife.” —Jeff Dolven, author of Senses of Style

“The significance of aesthetic experience for social formation and political possibility is one of the central questions of our time. Whereas most accounts of this take their orientation from Kant or post-Enlightenment developments, or from 'perennial' questions about the relation of art to politics, Early Modern Political Aesthetics gives us a valuable window onto an early modernity in which 'political aesthetics' in our modern sense starts to take recognizable form.” —Paul Kottman, author of Love as Human Freedom.

"Recommended." —C. A. Colmo, emeritus, Dominican University, CHOICE

“This collection greatly rewards the close attention of anyone interested in political theology, phenomenology, and of course aesthetics.” —Ethan John Guagliardo, Renaissance Quarterly