Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond - Hardcover

$117.00
$117.00
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Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond
  • Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond
Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond - Hardcover

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond - Hardcover

by Whitney Davis
$117.00
$117.00

Book Overview

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers.

Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways.

Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today.
ISBN9780231146906
Author Whitney Davis
PublisherColumbia University Press
GenreArts, Literature, Philosophy, and History
FormatHardcover
PublishedAugust 2010
LanguageENG- English
Pages368
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Art History Literary Criticism Nonfiction Philosophy

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More by Whitney Davis

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond - Hardcover

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond - Hardcover

By Whitney Davis

About Whitney Davis

WHITNEY DAVIS, Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, is the author of Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art; Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art; and Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis. He is the editor of Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History.

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