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Over the last decade a radical transformation of literary study has taken place, a transformation most distinctly connected to a fundamental change in the conception of what constitutes the "literary."  A  shift in emphasis from interpretation to theory and from questions about what texts might "mean" to questions about the systems that contain them, along with the movement to replace literary study with cultural studies, have all contributed to this change.  In response to this transformation, George Levine has assembled essays by a wide variety of leading scholars in the field of literary study. The contributors to this book rethink the aesthetic, rewrite its history, and reestablish the formal as a necessary element in criticism of literature and of its ideological implications. An early step in the recuperation of the aesthetic, Aesthetics and Ideology works through the discourses of race, gender, class, and politics, using many of the strategies of contemporary theory, to show how the aesthetic vitally and richly opens itself to new politics, and new possibilities of human value. This is an important contribution to the current academic culture wars.