Teaching Beauty in Delillo, Woolf, and Merrill

What happened to beauty? How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological. Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty's ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.

About the Author:
Jennifer Green-Lewis is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University and is on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She is the author of Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism

About the Author:
Margaret Soltan is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University and is the author of the blog "University Diaries"