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

Author: Zhang Xuchun
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Features: Political Aesthetics and Aesthetic Politics is a book revised and expanded from Xuchun's doctoral dissertation. It took six years to complete and underwent several intellectual transformations, making it a very serious and diligent academic work. In fact, this book was conceived in the mid-to-late 1990s amidst academic debates about modernity. At that time, when academics 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 and is a product of the modernity project. However, under the grand historical backdrop of the modernity project, Romanticism in China and the UK has presented distinct characteristics due to the influence and constraints of their respective cultural, social, and historical factors.