The Forbidden Subject<\/em>\u00a0launches from Ed Abbey\u2019s affirmation in\u00a0Desert Solitaire<\/em>: \u2018This is the most beautiful place on earth\u2019. How could such a sentiment become construed as problematic, elitist, or worse? How was a calculated and intentional attack on beauty sustained for more than a century? How did beauty become, and why does it largely remain, what Emory Elliot dubbed \u2018the forbidden subject\u2019? This book reviews the devastating impacts modernist avant-garde, Marxism, some feminisms and postmodernism have enacted \u2013 through paranoia, blame, cynicism \u2013 on beauty, hope and desire. Oppositional epistemologies deliberately eviscerated the possibilities and standing of beauty in criticism as well as in lived experience. According to Myra Jehlen, the orthodox critic thus became \u2018an adversary of the work he or she analyses\u2019, tasked with undoing the aesthetic deception of what was read to \u2018expose its misrepresentations and false ideals, to strip away the lie and expose the liar\u2019. Tracing the war on natural beauty through the literary and visual arts,\u00a0The Forbidden Subject<\/em>\u00a0asks what it has meant for the humanities, for problem solving environmental issues, for educating students, for our personal lives and, more recently, for ecocriticism. The book asks if current ecocriticism has been misdirected by the corrosive weight of negativity \u2013 the requirement always to be \u2018reading against\u2019 \u2013 that has persisted in the arts and humanities for decades. It rehearses why a \u2018return to beauty\u2019 was imperative, and what has happened to that return since the turn of the twenty-first century. Pondering these questions,\u00a0The Forbidden Subject<\/em> intertwines the potential place and nature of beauty and the beauty of nature and place, concluding with a substantial reading of the poetry and thought of Robinson Jeffers. Read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ISBN 978-1-912186-09-9 (HB)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1052,"template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[79],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4162","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-envphil","8":"first","9":"instock","10":"shipping-taxable","11":"purchasable","12":"product-type-variable"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/4162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=4162"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=4162"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whpress.co.uk\/publications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=4162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}