Aestheticization of Politics and Politicization of Aesthetics: Chinese and British Romanticism in the Perspective of Modernity

Author: Zhang Xuchun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Political Aesthetics and Aesthetic Politics is a revised and expanded version of Xuchun's doctoral dissertation. The book took six years to complete and underwent several intellectual transformations, making it a very serious and diligent academic work. In fact, this book by Xuchun emerged from the debates in academia in the mid-to-late 1990s about modernity. At that time, when scholars were contentious over some vague concepts related to modernity, Xuchun took a different approach, focusing on the relationship between Romanticism and modernity, a topic rarely addressed by domestic scholars. Xuchun argues that as a literary and aesthetic movement, Romanticism, in both Eastern and Western contexts, is centered on the establishment of the principle of subjectivity. It is a product of the modernity project. However, under the grand historical backdrop of the modernity project, the Romantic movements in China and the UK exhibit different characteristics due to the influence and constraints of their respective specific cultural, social, and historical factors.