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.

Jennifer Green-Lewis is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University. Margaret Soltan is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University.

Teaching Beauty Beauty and the Emotions: Introductory Lessons Beauty Denied 'Aside from a Pushing World': Making Space for Beauty in the Classroom 'Beauty Anyhow': Virginia Woolf in Vermont Beauty and Balance: James Merrill on Santorini Beauty after 9/11: Don DeLillo in New York Beauty's Return Conclusion: Falling Towers