Introduction

Abstract 2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic (2000), a powerful work of critical theory that aimed to “rethink the aesthetic” in the face of an antiaesthetic disposition that had come to dominate literary theory by the end of the 1990s. Erudite, witty, and experimental in form, The Radical Aesthetic received scant attention in American academia when it was published, yet Armstrong's brilliant polemic against the antiaesthetic anticipates many concerns and debates in literary studies over the years since its publication: an exhaustion with the hermeneutics of suspicion; a desire to take seriously beauty, pleasure, and aesthetic experience; and an investment in the poetics and politics of emotion. The introduction to this special issue seeks to give Armstrong's work its due and to put it back into conversation with the scholarship on the aesthetic that followed in its wake.