471 books match the query 'Aesthetics' and 23 start with p

cover of Paradise and Method: Poetry and Praxis

Paradise and Method

Poetry and Praxis

Bruce Andrews

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Paradise & Method: Poetics and Praxis collects nearly two decades of work on poetics by one of the pioneers of the "language poetry" movement.

Addressing poetics from a poet's perspective, Andrews focuses on the ways in which meaning is produced and challenged. His essays aim "to map out opportunities for making sense (or making noise)--both in reading and writing contemporary literature. At the center has been a desire to explore language, as up close as possible, as a material and social medium for restagings of meaning and power." Andrews analyzes poetics and the production of meaning; alternative traditions and canons; and innovative contemporary poetry, particularly its break with many of the premises and constraints of even the most forward-looking modernisms.
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cover of Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs: Aesthetics and Survival

Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs

Aesthetics and Survival

Ann Morrison Spinney

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

Based on extensive research across several disciplines, this book examines the songs and dances involved in public ceremonies of the Wabanaki Confederacy, a coalition of five Algonquian First Nations that figured importantly in the political history of New England and the Maritimes from the seventeenth century on. Ethnomusicologist Ann Morrison Spinney analyzes these ceremonial performances as they have been maintained in one of those nations, the Passamaquoddy community of Maine. She compares historical accounts with forms that have persisted to the present, showing how versions of the same songs, dances, and ritual speeches have continued to play a vital role in Passamaquoddy culture over time. A particular focus of the study is the annual Sipayik Indian Day, a public presentation of the dances associated with the protocols of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Spinney interprets these practices using melodic analysis and cultural contextual frameworks, drawing on a variety of sources, including written documents, sound and video recordings, interviews with singers, dancers, and other cultural practitioners, and her own fieldwork observations. Her research shows that Passamaquoddy techniques of song composition and performance parallel both the structure of the Passamaquoddy language and the political organizations that these ceremonies support.
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cover of Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger

Philosophies of Art and Beauty

Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger

Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns

University of Chicago Press, 1964

A remarkably wide-ranging anthology that covers the major philosophical works on art and aesthetics from the ancients to today

This anthology of primary texts gathers an incredibly large number of the most important philosophical writings on art and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thought. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns present English-language translations of works of
  • Plato
  • Aristotle
  • Plotinus
  • Augustine
  • Marsilio Ficino
  • Earl of Shaftesbury
  • Kant
  • Schelling
  • Hegel
  • Schopenhauer
  • Nietzsche
  • Benedetto Croce
  • John Dewey
  • Heidegger
This anthology is remarkable not only for those selections, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism.
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cover of Philosophy Looks At The Arts

Philosophy Looks At The Arts

Joseph Margolis

Temple University Press, 1987

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cover of Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts

Philosophy by Other Means

The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts

Robert B. Pippin

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. His latest book, Philosophy by Other Means, extends this trajectory, offering a collection of essays that present profound considerations of philosophical issues in aesthetics alongside close readings of novels by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee.

The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline’s traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin’s claim is twofold: criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.
 
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cover of Philosophy of New Music

Philosophy of New Music

Theodor W. Adorno

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

An indispensable key to Adorno’s influential oeuvre—now in paperback

In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher’s return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it. 

Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. 

In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre. 

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cover of Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought

Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought

John T. Lysaker

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Lysaker examines the relationship between philosophical thought and the act of writing to explore how this dynamic shapes the field of philosophy.

Philosophy’s relation to the act of writing is John T. Lysaker’s main concern in Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought. Whether in Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, philosophy has come in many forms, and those forms—the concrete shape philosophizing takes in writing—matter. Much more than mere adornment, the style in which a given philosopher writes is often of crucial importance to the point he or she is making, part and parcel of the philosophy itself.

Considering how writing influences philosophy, Lysaker explores genres like aphorism, dialogue, and essay, as well as logical-rhetorical operations like the example, irony, and quotation. At the same time, he shows us the effects of these rhetorical devices through his own literary experimentation. In dialogue with such authors as Benjamin, Cavell, Emerson, and Lukács, he aims to revitalize philosophical writing, arguing that philosophy cannot fulfill its intellectual and cultural promise if it keeps to professional articles and academic prose. Instead, philosophy must embrace writing as an essential, creative activity, and deliberately reform how it approaches its subject matter, readership, and the evolving social practices of reading and reflection.
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cover of Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics

Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics

François Laruelle

University of Minnesota Press, 2012


Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.

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cover of Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition

Placing Aesthetics

Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition

Robert E. Wood

Ohio University Press, 2000

Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker’s philosophy.

In Professor Robert Wood’s study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey’s terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is the dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural , and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions.

Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, Placing Aesthetics aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions.

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cover of Plato's Symposium: A Translation by Seth Benardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete

Plato's Symposium

A Translation by Seth Benardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete

Plato

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Plato, Allan Bloom wrote, is "the most erotic of philosophers," and his Symposium is one of the greatest works on the nature of love ever written. This new edition brings together the English translation of the renowned Plato scholar and translator, Seth Benardete, with two illuminating commentaries on it: Benardete's "On Plato's Symposium" and Allan Bloom's provocative essay, "The Ladder of Love." In the Symposium, Plato recounts a drinking party following an evening meal, where the guests include the poet Aristophanes, the drunken Alcibiades, and, of course, the wise Socrates. The revelers give their views on the timeless topics of love and desire, all the while addressing many of the major themes of Platonic philosophy: the relationship of philosophy and poetry, the good, and the beautiful.
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cover of Plotinus on Beauty (Enneads 1.6 and 5.8.1–2): The Greek Text with Notes

Plotinus on Beauty (Enneads 1.6 and 5.8.1–2)

The Greek Text with Notes

Andrew Smith

SBL Press, 2019

A Greek edition of Plotinus's philosophical works with notes for students of Classical Greek

Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, composed the treatise On Beauty (Ennead 1.6) as the first of a series of philosophical essays devoted to interpreting and elucidating Platonic ideas. This treatise is one of the most accessible and influential of Plotinus's works, and it provides a stimulating entrée into the many facets of his philosophical activity. In this volume Andrew Smith first introduces readers to the Greek of Plotinus and to his philosophy in general, then provides the Greek text of and English notes on Plotinus's systematic argument and engaging exhortation to foster the inner self. The volume ends with the text of and notes on Plotinus's complementary statements in On Intelligible Beauty (Ennead 5.8.1–2).

Features:

  • An overview of Plotinus's life
  • Background discussion of Plotinus's thought and outline of his philosophical system
  • Analysis of the relationship of Plotinus's thought to Plato’s
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cover of Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century

Poetry as a Way of Life

Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century

Gabriel Trop

Northwestern University Press, 2014

What would it mean to make a work of art the focal point of one’s life practice? Poetry as a Way of Life goes back to the origins of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the early eighteenth century in order to uncover an understanding of the work of art as an exercise of the self. Engaging in close readings of works by both canonical and less well-known eighteenth-century German poets such as Friedrich Holderlin, Novalis, Friedrich von Hagedorn, and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Gabriel Trop illustrates the ways in which these authors tap into the potential of poetic form to redefine the limits of human perception and generate alternative ways of being in the world.

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cover of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis

Poetry in a World of Things

Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis

Rachel Eisendrath

University of Chicago Press, 2018

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world.

In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.
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cover of Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain

Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation

The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain

John G. Trapani Jr.

Catholic University of America Press, 2011

Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation provides a basic introduction to, and an extensive examination of, Maritain's philosophy of art and beauty
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cover of Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

Edited by Christopher Pye

Northwestern University Press, 2020

The turn to political concerns in Renaissance studies, beginning in the 1980s, was dictated by forms of cultural materialism that staked their claims against the aesthetic dimension of the work. Recently, however, the more robustly political conception of the aesthetic formulated by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière has revitalized literary analysis generally and early modern studies in particular. For these theorists, aesthetics forms the crucial link between politics and the most fundamental phenomenological organization of the world, what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.”

Taking up this expansive conception of aesthetics, Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare suggests that the political stakes of the literary work—and Shakespeare’s work in particular—extend from the most intimate dimensions of affective response to the problem of the grounds of political society. The approaches to aesthetic thought included in this volume explore the intersections between the literary work and the full range of concerns animating the field today: political philosophy, affect theory, and ecocritical analysis of environs and habitus.
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cover of Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic

Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic

Justin Hodgson

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

The proliferation of smart devices, digital media, and network technologies has led to everyday people experiencing everyday things increasingly on and through the screen. In fact, much of the world has become so saturated by digital mediations that many individuals have adopted digitally inflected sensibilities. This gestures not simply toward posthumanism, but more fundamentally toward an altogether post-digital condition—one in which the boundaries between the “real” and the “digital” have become blurred and technology has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of the world.
 
Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic takes stock of these reconfigurations and their implications for rhetorical studies by taking up the New Aesthetic—a movement introduced by artist/digital futurist James Bridle that was meant to capture something of a digital way of seeing by identifying aesthetic values that could not exist without computational and digital technologies. Bringing together work in rhetoric, art, and digital media studies, Hodgson treats the New Aesthetic as a rhetorical ecology rather than simply an aesthetic movement, allowing him to provide operative guides for the knowing, doing, and making of rhetoric in a post-digital culture.
 
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cover of Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition

Postmodern Sophistications

Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition

David Kolb

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.
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cover of Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination

Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination

Juan Meneses

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Igniting political power through the lens of art and the imagination

Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination investigates the erosion of meaningful political action in today’s world. Gathering writings from an array of scholars, editor Juan Meneses asks: can an aesthetic theory of postpolitics help us understand and counteract the most insidious processes of depoliticization?

The contributors to this volume explore how the aesthetic imagination can play a crucial role in reenvisioning key political elements, including governance, agency, rights, and responsibility. With a survey of various artistic mediums—film, dance, music, literature, and digital media—the essays illustrate how the aesthetic can reveal ways to breathe new life into the work of emancipatory politics. Reclaiming the arts and humanities as vital to political life, the contributors revisit but also move beyond the social sciences’ central focus on neoliberalism and public administration to address other topics such as tech-capitalism, race, environmental violence, and patriarchy.

Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination argues for a conscious deployment of aesthetics to resist political anesthesia and promote a more just society, underscoring the role of the imagination in political engagement and change.

Contributors: Jacquelyn Arcy, U of Wisconsin–Parkside; Christopher Breu, Illinois State U; Stephen Charbonneau, Florida Atlantic U; Eric Lemmon, Webster U; Robert P. Marzec, Purdue U; Allison Page, Rutgers U–Camden; Matthew Scully, U of Lausanne; Erik Swyngedouw, U of Manchester; Sherryl Vint, U of California, Riverside.

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cover of Poverty and Antitheatricality: Form and Formlessness in Latin American Literature, Art, and Theory

Poverty and Antitheatricality

Form and Formlessness in Latin American Literature, Art, and Theory

Stephen Buttes

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Poverty and Antitheatricality argues that many major analytical approaches today misunderstand the problem of poverty by emphasizing its status as an experience. These experiential models transform poverty from a specific socioeconomic status lived in a particular historical sequence into a transhistorical presence of marginality that is not only inevitable but necessary. Embedded in capitalist, socialist, and populist forms of socioeconomic organization, these models paradoxically suggest that if we want to have a world free of poverty, we must always have the poor and their experience of formlessness. Taking up the paired terms—form and formlessness—Stephen Buttes demonstrates how they sustain not only debates about poverty and its political role within modernity but also the idea of the work of art within the history of modernism. Offering critiques of critical theory alongside new readings of both canonical and little-studied Latin American authors and artists, Poverty and Antitheatricality makes a compelling case that understanding the kind of problem the work of art is opens up overlooked but essential pathways to understanding poverty and the kind of problem it is.
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cover of Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy

Pretexts for Writing

German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy

Williams, Seán M

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Around 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European–and, above all, German–Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of Primitive Art in Civilized Places: Second Edition

Primitive Art in Civilized Places

Second Edition

Sally Price

University of Chicago Press, 2002

What is so "primitive" about primitive art? And how do we dare to use our standards to judge it? Drawing on an intriguing mixture of sources-including fashion ads and films, her own anthropological research, and even comic strips like Doonesbury—Price explores the cultural arrogance implicit in Westerners' appropriation of non-Western art.

"[Price] presents a literary collage of the Western attitude to other cultures, and in particular to the visual art of the Third and Fourth Worlds. . . . Her book is not about works of 'primitive art' as such, but about the Western construction 'Primitive Art.' It is a critique of Western ignorance and arrogance: ignorance about other cultures and arrogance towards them."—Jeremy Coote, Times Literary Supplement

"The book is infuriating, entertaining, and inspirational, leaving one feeling less able than before to pass judgment on 'known' genres of art, but feeling more confident for that."—Joel Smith, San Francisco Review of Books

"[A] witty, but scholarly, indictment of the whole primitive-art business, from cargo to curator. And because she employs sarcasm as well as pedagogy, Price's book will probably forever deprive the reader of the warm fuzzies he usually gets standing before the display cases at the local ethnographic museum."—Newsweek
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cover of Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond

Process and Aesthetics

An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond

Ondrej Dadejík, Martin Kaplický, Miloš Ševcík, and Vlastimil Zuska

Karolinum Press, 2021

A groundbreaking analysis of Alfred North Whitehead’s thinking on aesthetics.
 
Though philosopher Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles specifically to aesthetics, aesthetic motifs nonetheless permeate his entire body of work. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy versus mediation, and aesthetic contextualism versus aesthetic isolationism. The concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial to their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty.
 
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cover of Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century

Propaganda and Aesthetics

The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century

Abby Arthur Johnson

University of Massachusetts Press, 1979

The literary materials in Afro-American magazines of the twentieth century weave into a rich narrative. The journals provide insight, not available in a comparable manner elsewhere, into the evolution of Afro-American literature. They trace the contributions made by major figures, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, among several others. They record the discussions over art and propaganda which have been long prominent in black literature. Decade by decade, black artists and intellectuals have debated the function of Afro-American literature: should it serve the aesthetic tastes of the individual writer, or should it advance the interests of Afro-Americans as a group. Some writers favored art-for-art's sake, or approximations of that emphasis; others articulated the need for art-for-people's sake, as they termed it.

Little work has been done on individual Afro-American periodicals and nothing, up to this point, has been published on twentieth-century black journals as a group. Studies of magazines in general are relatively rare, with only The Little Magazine, by Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn P. Ulrich, attempting a survey of small journals in this century. This book fills a considerable gap in literary history by detailing the development of Afro-American magazines in this century.
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