Natalie Prizel's book asks readers (and lookers) to lift the scales from our eyes and replace them with another sort of scale, so to speak -an ethical, nonjudgmental gaze, slow to label and categorize.We can learn to look thus, Prizel contends, by returning to nineteenth-century cases where the ethics of regard was repeatedly tested in relation to the "aberrant bodies" of her subtitle: the disabled and queer.Theoretically adventurous and sumptuously illustrated, Victorian Ethical Optics develops rich and often surprising readings of novels, poetry, and nonfiction alongside paintings, drawings, and sculpture.Akin to studies like Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination and Ruth Yeazell's Art of the Everyday, Prizel's book expertly addresses both literary-critical and art-historical audiences in demanding a generous mode of attention to subjects often overlooked or dismissed.Despite his miserable response to actual disability, John Ruskin is central to this argument.For Prizel, his notion of "innocence of the eye" -formulated to help students cultivate freshness of artistic sight -betokens a fundamentally ethical form of looking that respects the recalcitrant opacity of its objects.Casting Ruskin as "a crip and queer theorist" (3) despite himself, Prizel amplifies "optical innocence" (21) into a robust concept informed by various theoretical discourses.These include the radical ethics of openness to alterity (via Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and douard Glissant); queer theory, especially where it dwells on failure (Jack Halberstam), futurity (Jos Esteban Muoz), and

Abstract This essay explores how Jane Austen’s influential deployment of free indirect discourse to center the minds of her heroines has been addressed in two recent film adaptations of her work. In Austen’s novels, free indirect discourse provides essential access to the interiority of her focal characters, a narrative device that poses a problem to filmmakers desiring to likewise center the protagonists’ minds in a visual medium. The novels Emma and Persuasion both rely on the reader’s understanding of their protagonists’ consciousnesses to elicit readerly sympathy and judgment. While film scholars disagree over whether a true filmic version of free indirect discourse itself is possible, debut filmmakers Autumn de Wilde (director of the 2020 film Emma.) and Carrie Cracknell (director of 2022’s Persuasion) both recognize the importance of conveying the heroine’s consciousness for any successful Austenian adaptation. Their two films, however, address this challenge in entirely disparate ways. Where de Wilde creates a vibrant and engaging portrait of Emma Woodhouse’s agile and narcissistic mind, Cracknell’s techniques for presenting the mind of Anne Elliot prove self-contradictory and generically incoherent. Analysis of these two films in tandem offers insight into the difficulties of selecting and arranging screen techniques to convey the mind with the richness the novel form allows, as well as reiterating the paramount importance of female interiority to the appeal of Austen’s narratives.

Abstract This essay explores the phenomenon of what the essay terms “astrolyricism”: a fusion of the extraterrestrial and the lyrical to generate culturally mandated emotions of hope and despair in the face of the apparent end of the world. Astrolyricism is a multimedia phenomenon of the Global North during the era of the Great Acceleration, the rapid increase of human activity and impact on planetary systems since the 1950s. Poets, astrophysicists, and filmmakers of this era bring together lyric and extraterrestrial space to generate and reflect the ambivalent emotions of this era. This essay follows astrolyricism across genre and media, including Ada Limón’s poem bound for Jupiter’s moon Europa aboard the NASA Clipper mission, the poetry-infused popular science work of astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and the apocalyptic films of Christopher Nolan. Together, these examples demonstrate how astrolyricism emerges as an ambivalent reaction to planetary precarity. Lyric poetry, these examples suggest, also offers tools to think about how emotions around the end of the world mark gendered, racialized, and imperial power dynamics that also speak to the varied ways people experience crisis across unequal historical and material conditions.

Abstract F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and “Spring in Fialta” are perfectionist love stories that feature car accidents. What is the relationship of the aesthetic bliss that replaces romantic bliss, on the one hand, to a plot that depends on random violence, on the other? This essay argues that Fitzgerald is Nabokov's precursor in reconciling the age of randomness, as noted and theorized by Victorian novelists, to modernist technical perfectionism by considering accidents in the Aristotelian-Thomistic way, as the inessential disguise and deliverer of substantial change, the transubstantiation of God. Nabokov is Fitzgerald's antitype: a canonical linkage that reveals the synchronicity of time. The essay puts Fitzgerald's ambition to write a novel better than he can write in relation to John Freccero's argument about The Divine Comedy: that it is the record of Dante's attempt to write a poem better than he can write — at least at first, before his conversion by way of Inferno. The problem for Fitzgerald and Nabokov is that language itself cannot play the role of the transubstantiated God, the substance that hides behind the accidents of their books. The essay is a tribute to the failed attempt, which, as opposed to Victorian art, does not live within modernity but seeks, impossibly, to forestall it.

Abstract Right illiberalists and left illiberalists find common cause when they censure the teaching of art and literature on moral grounds. The philosopher Immanuel Kant dedicated his career to categorical clarification, exhaustively defining morality and aesthetics as separate realms of human activity. Today, right illiberalists and left illiberalists confuse or conflate the categories and conceive of aesthetics in morally instrumentalist terms, turning the response to works of art from an individual, subjective experience into a collective, social experience. Among the many developments in the pre-Kantian era was the idea derived from Horace's Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry) that art might have the dual purpose of providing both pleasure and usefulness. Horace's offhand comment hardened into dogma in the eighteenth century, whereupon Kant thought through the problems that attend to cognition (pure reason), morality (practical reason), and aesthetics (judgment). Kant's categorical separation of aesthetic satisfaction from both logical procedures and moral prescriptions had the effect of isolating art from those domains, of course, but it also made it seem that the experience of art necessarily had to be removed from any social context whatsoever. The neo-Kantian Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling addressed this issue, but in doing so he began to collapse the Kantian categories, arguing that the cognitive realm and the aesthetic realm become merged in the work of art. This maneuver did nothing to prevent a like fusion involving the realm of practical reason, whether in its individual manifestation as morality or its collective manifestation as politics, thereby opening the way to the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's ecstatic claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The assertion is at odds with Shelley's Hegelianism, since Hegel himself had scant use for art in comparison to that far more important human enterprise, the philosophical pursuit of truth. Hegel concluded that anyone who asserts that “art has to serve as a means for moral ends” is taking a “false position.” The true position—that is, that art is not a means for moral ends—was taken up by Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Pater, neo-Hegelians both, who made similar arguments, albeit in very different language, about the removal of morality from both art and appropriate human behavior. Nietzsche and Pater help us to understand that, while moral judgment may have a place in aesthetic understanding, moral prohibition does not.

The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a New Concept is about the history of an idea.But it begins with a body in a movie theater.The body is Jones's, and it is having a physiological experience that astounds the mind that lives in the body.As he watches and listens to the concert documentary Amazing Grace, Jones feels the music -not just as emotional transport but as "entrainment."The music draws his body into its pattern, so that he is connected to the vibrations in the theater furniture, the other theatergoers around him, the voice of Aretha Franklin, and the historically and culturally distant congregation in the film.He realizes that "rhythm" names what is happening to his body and how it is compelled by and connected to these other entities.This engaging anecdote, to which Jones returns periodically throughout the book, grounds his historical study of rhythm in embodied rhythmic experience.When he turns to the subject of poetic rhythm, this means both the experience of nineteenth-century bodies and the experience of his own body as he reads nineteenth-century poems.Jones reminds us that combining historical and phenomenological arguments in this way is unusual: conceptual historians tend to resist making inferences about how historical bodies felt, while literary critics tend to resist making connections between "singular embodiment" and "cultural representations" (15).(And historians of prosody often avoid describing poetic form in a way that is unabashedly subjective and autobiographical.)In his close readings, though, Jones locates

Abstract This essay considers some of the ethical issues surrounding the objectifying tendencies of the aesthetic gaze, both during the nineteenth century and today, with particular reference to the ways in which it treats the female body. It discusses Max Beerbohm's famous essay “A Defence of Cosmetics” (1894) before turning to Walter Pater's ethics and finally addressing what these debates might reveal to us about aestheticism today, with reference to Vernon Lee's take on the aesthetic gaze in her imaginary portrait “Dionea” (1890).

Abstract The twentieth-century writer Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) is seldom included in studies of literary aestheticism. However, this article proposes that Brophy developed a distinctive theory of ethical aestheticism that both aligns with and extends the politicized uses of aestheticism found in the work of her nineteenth-century forebears such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Through close analysis of Brophy's genre-defying plots, this article shows that Brophy's ethical aestheticism is expressed in her two early novels, The King of a Rainy Country (1956) and Flesh (1962). Within these narratives, the way that characters look at, touch, and respond to art reflects their political and affective stance toward other characters within the text and toward notions of otherness and identification in a broader sense. Although Brophy's engagement with the political dimensions of aestheticism is subtle and oblique, her novels ultimately use these encounters with art objects to reflect on the porous boundaries between subject and object, as a way of reimagining human relationships and power dynamics.

Abstract 2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic (2000), a powerful work of critical theory that aimed to “rethink the aesthetic” in the face of an antiaesthetic disposition that had come to dominate literary theory by the end of the 1990s. Erudite, witty, and experimental in form, The Radical Aesthetic received scant attention in American academia when it was published, yet Armstrong's brilliant polemic against the antiaesthetic anticipates many concerns and debates in literary studies over the years since its publication: an exhaustion with the hermeneutics of suspicion; a desire to take seriously beauty, pleasure, and aesthetic experience; and an investment in the poetics and politics of emotion. The introduction to this special issue seeks to give Armstrong's work its due and to put it back into conversation with the scholarship on the aesthetic that followed in its wake.

Abstract This essay traces Isobel Armstrong's use, in The Radical Aesthetic (2000), of Freud's distinction between analysis and acting out. It defines the difference between these activities in criticism in order to describe the difference between criticism that takes aesthetic questions radically and seriously and the kinds of criticism that do not. There is reference to trends in criticism in the first quarter of this century. The essay concludes by considering specific examples of Armstrong's more radical, analytic mode from across her career.