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Stephen Shapiro, Edward Cahill. Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 847–848, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.847
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Extract
Literary studies has returned to consider anew the relationship between cultural forms and globalizing, or periodizing, political and economic shifts. One way to gauge this turn is through critics' use or avoidance of the keyword aesthetics. For some time aesthetics was made a marginal concern in American Studies as a concept contaminated by social elite prejudices or the resting place of scholars who, for whatever reason, did not join the transition from New Criticism to approaches formed by admixtures of European theory, cultural materialism, and “new” historicism. Several generations of literary scholars heard the echoes of racial, ethnic, and sex-gender prejudice when the topic of aesthetics was raised. More recently, though, aesthetics has been recuperated as a viable topic. The focus on evaluating sensory or emotional response has been moving forward in discussions of affect, religiosity, and even media, or network-systems theory, but even these have often held back from pronouncing their concerns as a matter of aesthetics.
