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Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism proposes a stunning alternative to our habit of thinking of the work of art as an occasion for heightened vision or temporary respite. Like the mind-blowing opening lines of many of Dickinson's poems, Pyle's radical aestheticism undoes the apotropaic function usually assigned to art, and understands poetry not as a domain offering and requiring protection from encroaching forces, but as a darkness-making event and as the unwilled imposition of a sensuous apprehension. In this brilliant, beautifully written work of literary criticism that promises to leave its own readers exquisitely undone, Forest Pyle unthreads Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde into figures, reflections, traces, and lines that, unlike the Medusa's face, will never resolve themselves into a single, readable, and hence pierce-able image.-Anne-Lise Francois, University of California, BerkeleyThis is one of the most powerful and subtle books I've read on 19th-century literature in decades. It's searching, meticulous, and wide-ranging as it pursues its novel, overarching thesis. Pyle brings into striking relief what is powerful and problematic in an important strain of 19th-century literature, setting its poetry in motion all over again.-Ian Balfour, York University

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Forest Pyle is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism.

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