Abstract

Beauty is a contested category today because we both long for and fear its seductions. The essays in this volume interrogate beauty in all its complexity. But whether they construe it as friend or foe, they make it clear that beauty, and our preoccupation with it, cannot be wished away. deeply embedded in that inchoate matter from which our judgments of value are formed, beauty is inseparable from all that is best and worst in human experience.