The recovery of beauty : arts, culture, medicine

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'. Front Matter....Pages i-xviii Introduction....Pages 1-17 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 Beautiful Ideas: The Visibility of Truth....Pages 21-34 Beauty, Virtue and Danger in Medieval English Romance....Pages 35-52 Bathing for Beauty in the Middle Ages....Pages 53-71 Posture is Beauty....Pages 72-83 Front Matter....Pages 85-85 Beauty, Pain and Violence: Through Lessing and Nietzsche to King Lear....Pages 87-107 Beauty Writes Literary History: Revisiting the Myth of Bloomsbury....Pages 108-128 ‘Raising Sparks’: An Interview with Michael Symmons Roberts....Pages 129-149 ‘More natural than nature, more artificial than art’: An Interview with David Bintley....Pages 150-172 Front Matter....Pages 173-173 ‘Elegant’ Surgery: The Beauty of Clinical Expertise....Pages 175-198 Portraiture, Beauty, Pain....Pages 199-216 War and Beauty: The Act of Unmasking in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room and Louisa Young’s My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You....Pages 217-234 Front Matter....Pages 235-235 Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder: Art, Neural Plasticity and Visual Pleasure....Pages 237-253 The Pendulum of Taste: Architecture and the Rise of a State Aesthetic....Pages 254-270 Beauty and the Sacred....Pages 271-278 Back Matter....Pages 279-292 The Recovery of Beauty comprises fourteen essays exploring what constitutes beauty across time in Western thought and art, its shaping and sustained cultural role, and its relation to a fully human existence. The book engages with the need to rescue beauty, not just to keep alive traditions of thought, but also to reinstate beauty as something more than a shifting cultural construction, to probe its constants and its value. Many of the essays engage with the cultural history of beauty and of its recovery, exploring the development of conceptions of beauty across time, the ways in which tensions are inherent in cultural understandings of beauty, the differences and continuities between past and present ideas of beauty, and the intersection of the aesthetic with the moral and spiritual. Literature provides a particular focus, but the book engages too with medicine and cosmetic surgery, philosophy, theology, visual arts, architecture and dance. Recurrent themes are the human need for beauty, its links to truth and understanding, and also its deceptive dangers. Finally, the book asks: does beauty have a restorative or healing agency?