Book Review: Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Abstract

Despite the prominence of feminist theory in literary, film, and visual arts critique, feminist theories of aesthetics remain rare, obscuring a crucial chapter in women's history. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek redresses this oversight through a full articulation of feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly. On loss, invention, and the dilemmas of feminist aesthetics -- Revolutionary praxis and its melancholic impasses -- On suffrage militancy and modernism: femininity and revolt -- Melancholia, death of art, and women's writing -- Woolf's aesthetics of potentiality -- Female bodies, violence, and form -- Rethinking the form-matter divide in feminist politics and aesthetics -- Abstract commodity form and bare life -- Damaged materialities in political struggles and aesthetic innovations -- Toward a feminine aesthetics of renaissance -- Enigma of Nella Larsen: letters, curse, and black laughter.