This ground-breaking new work offers a spirited and severe critique of the turn to an anti-aesthetic in theoretical writing and asserts that it has now become an intellectual necessity to rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse.

Isobel Armstrong is professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, nineteenth-century poetry, poetics, politics, theories of language and contemporary literary theory. She is co-editor of Women: A Cultural Review. Her most recent books include Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) and the Oxford Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (1996), edited with Joe Bristow.