ABSTRACT
This volume explores the relationship among beauty, violence, and representation in a broad range of artistic and cultural texts, including literature, visual art, theatre, film, and music.
Charting diversifying interests in the subject of violence and beauty, dealing with the multiple inflections of these questions and representing a spectrum of voices, the volume takes its place in a growing body of recent critical work that takes violence and representation as its object. This collection offers a unique opportunity, however, to address a significant gap in the critical field, for it seeks to interrogate specifically the nexus or interface between beauty and violence. While other texts on violence make use of regimes of representation as their subject matter and consider the effects of aestheticization, beauty as a critical category is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the book aims to "rehabilitate" beauty, implicitly conceptualized as politically or ethically regressive by postmodern anti-aesthetics cultural positions, and further facilitate its come-back into critical discourse.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|58 pages
Histories
chapter 1|13 pages
“Þus for Thy Goode I Schedde My Bloode”
chapter 2|13 pages
Staging Beauty; or, A History of Violence
chapter 3|12 pages
Beauty, Violence, and the East
part II|52 pages
Aesthetics
chapter 6|20 pages
“All Beauty Must Die”
chapter 7|17 pages
Environmentality and Air Travel Disasters
part III|61 pages
Resistance