Emmanouil Aretoulakis

Most would find it improper, even immoral, to admit to an aesthetic experience of the beautiful in the midst of terror and disaster. In this book, Emmanouil Aretoulakis explores the fascination with terror and human tragedy, which he terms forbiddenaesthetics, through various lenses including Kant’s idea of disinterested judgement of the beautiful and Burke’s concept of delight before real catastrophe.

Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture

Efterpi Mitsi

Anna Despotopoulou

Stamatina Dimakopoulou

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

Emmanouil Aretoulakis

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