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"The civil service examination essay-known as shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) or bagu wen (eight-legged essay) for its complex structure-was the most widely read and written literary genre in early modern China (1450-1850). As the primary mode of expression in which educated individuals were schooled, shiwen epitomized the literary enterprise even beyond the walls of the examination compound. But shiwen suffered condemnation in the shift in discourse on literary writing that followed the fall of the Ming dynasty, and were thoroughly rejected in the May Fourth iconoclasm of the early twentieth century. Challenging conventional disregard for the genre, Alexander Des Forges reads the examination essay from a literary perspective, showing how shiwen redefined prose aesthetics and transformed the work of writing. A new approach to subjectivity took shape: the question "who is speaking?" resonated through the essays' involuted prose style, foregrounding issues of agency and control. At the same time, the anonymity of the bureaucratic evaluation process highlighted originality as a literary value. Finally, an emphasis on questions of form marked the aesthetic as a key arena for contestation of authority as candidates, examiners, and critics joined to form a dominant social class of literary producers"--

Aesthetics in literature.

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Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to "idian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist (Goethe and Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Grillparzer and Stifter). The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the "exemplary originality" (Kant) that only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.

German literature --- Aesthetics in literature. --- Young Germany --- History and criticism. --- Aesthetics in literature --- History and criticism --- E-books

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Demonstrating that Bigolina challenged cultural authority by rejecting the prevailing views of both painting and literature, Nissen discusses Bigolina's suggestion that painting constituted an ineffectual, even immoral mode of self-promotion for women in relation to the views of the contemporary writer Pietro Aretino and the painter Titian. Kissing the Wild Woman's analysis of this little-known work adds a new dimension to the study of Renaissance aesthetics in relation to art history, Renaissance thought, women's studies, and Italian literature."--Pub. desc. "Giulia Bigolina's (ca. 1516-ca. 1569) Urania (ca. 1552) is the oldest known prose romance to have been written by an Italian woman. In Kissing the Wild Woman, Christopher Nissen explores the unique aesthetic vision and innovative narrative features of Bigolina's greatest surviving work, in which she fashioned a new type of narrative that combined elements of the romance and the novella and included a polemical treatise on the moral implications of portraiture and the role of women in the arts.

Painting in literature. --- Aesthetics in literature. --- Beauty, Personal, in literature. --- Bigolina, Giulia, --- Italy --- Civilization --- Bigolina, Giulia

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Aesthetics in literature. --- Ci (Chinese poetry) --- Chinese poetry --- Chinese literature --- History and criticism. --- Appreciation.

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This study provides a fundamental new reading of numerous commonplace positions in Germanic medieval studies relating to the physical beauty of literary figures. It looks at both canonic and more marginal Middle High German poems ("Erec," "Parzival," "Welscher Gast" [The Romance Stranger]) as well as their Medieval Latin context (poetorhetorics) and their discursive matrix, which is based in theology. "In Bezug auf das ubiquitäre Phänomen der körperlichen Schönheit literarischer Figuren hat sich ein breit akzeptierter Common Sense hinsichtlich der theologischen Fundierung einer vermeintlichen mittelalterlichen 'Ästhetik' und der Positivbewertung der Körperschönheit im höfischen Kontext ausgebildet. Dies versucht die vorliegende Arbeit zu re-evaluieren, um Anstoß zur weitergehenden kritischen Auseinandersetzung zu geben. Hierbei werden die Felder der sogenannten 'Kalokagathie', der 'descriptio pulchritudinis' und der Erkenntniskräft der 'Ästhetik' diskurskritisch befragt. Anhand einer Vielzahl von Texten wird dabei gezeigt, wie das Konzept des christlichen Fleisches die Matrix eines aporetischen Sprechens über Schönheit produziert, das noch den gegenwärtigen Diskurs grundiert. Neben theologischen Grundlagen für die christliche 'aisthesis' (Augustinus, Johannes Scotus, Hugo von St. Viktor) und poetologischen Grundlagen (Matthäus von Vendôme, Galfred von Vinsauf, Eberhard der Deutsche) rücken dabei verschiedene kanonische (Hartmann: Erec, Wolfram: Parzival), randständigere mittelhochdeutsche (Stricker, Minnereden, Thomasin: Der Welsche Gast) sowie einige mittellateinische Dichtungen (Alanus ab Insulis, Mohammedsviten) in den Fokus."--

Aesthetics in literature. --- Beauty, Personal, in literature. --- Literature, Medieval --- History and criticism.