Aesthetics and Ideology.

The attack on formalism by various literary theories - deconstruction, historicisms, marxisms, and feminisms - was bound to produce a reaction. By turning toward a strategy in which the literary ideals of the Romantic period have been historicized, critics have also historicized more general principles of aesthetics. This tactic has meant that that reaction has taken as its subject aesthetics rather than the narrower grounds of literary formalism articulated in the postwar years. In any case, the defense of aesthetics is the ground George Levine has staked out as the basis behind his collection of essays on Aesthetics and Ideology: rather than trying to show the ways that aesthetics is veiled ideology, he wants to find a ground for aesthetics that, while giving ideology its due, still finds a non-political free space in which concepts such as an integral field called the "literary," as well as form and value, have significance.

With the dialectical openness that characterizes his own criticism, Levine has gathered a wide range of voices to address the problem of whether and how to define a special space for the aesthetic. The odd effect of this openness is that the critics who …