This book takes as its starting point Shelley's assertion that poets are legislators and then tracks this aesthetic.

In The Aesthetics of International Law, Ed Morgan engages in a literary parsing of international legal texts. In order to demonstrate how these types of legal narratives are imbued with modernist aesthetics, Morgan juxtaposes international legal documents and modern (as well as some immediately pre- and post-modern) literary texts.

This book analyses the legal and aesthetic discourses that combine to shape the image of the criminal, and that image's contemporary endurance. The author traces the roots of contemporary ideas about criminality back to legal, philosophical and aesthetic concepts originating in the nineteenth century. Building on the ideas of Foucault and Walter Benjamin, Hutchings argues that the criminal, as constructed in places such as popular crime stories or the law of insanity, became an obsession which haunted nineteenth century thought.

In the wake of current criticisms of the legal profession, Peter Goodrich presents us with a radical alternative vision of the law. He examines past legal systems offering up the possibility of a more humane system.

This book examines how the nation – and its (fundamental) law – are ‘sensed’ by way of various aesthetic forms from the age of revolution up until our age of contested democratic legitimacy. Contemporary democratic legitimacy is tied, among other things, to consent, to representation, to the identity of ruler and ruled, and, of course, to legality and the legal forms through which democracy is structured. This book expands the ways in which we can understand and appreciate democratic legitimacy. If (democratic) communities are “imagined” this book suggests that their “rightfulness” must be “sensed” – analogously to the need for justice not only to be done, but to be seen to be done. This book brings together legal, historical and philosophical perspectives on the representation and iconography of the nation in the European, North American and Australian contexts from contributors in law, political science, history, art history and philosophy.

Preliminary Material -- Aesthetics: Definition and Object -- Difficuties for Aesthetics -- Immediate Aesthetics Perception--the Material Basis of Aesthetics -- The Optimal Starting Point: Nature or Art? -- Three Starting Points for Aesthetics Analysis -- The Essential Properties of Aesthetics Perception -- The Internal Structure of an Aesthetic Object -- The Expressiveness of an Aesthetic Object and its Objective Sense -- Aesthetic Form and Aesthetic Structure -- The Relations of Natural and Artistic Beauty with Respect to Origin -- The Aesthetic Critertion of Natural and Artistic Beauty is the Same -- The Conception of Nature's Beauty in the History of European Culture. The Beauty of Wild Nature -- The Beauty of Organic Forms -- Human Beauty. Its Ideal -- Organic Beauty and the Sexual Instinct -- Beauty and Ugliness. Their Relation in Art -- The Peculiarity of Natural Beauty -- The Relation of Primitive Art to Others Areas of Culture -- Attempts to Derive the Origin of Art form General Psychological Principles. Criticism -- Stimuli for the Emergence of Representational Art -- The Origin of Music -- General Conclusions -- The Artist and the Child (Primitive Man) -- A General Characterization of the Creative Process -- The Creative Process: Three Basic Moments -- Creative Imagination -- The Problem: Formulation and Explication -- Taine's "Milieu Theory" and its Critical Appraisal -- The Psychological Theory of "Numbing" and its Critique -- The Relation of the Artist's Individual and Creativity to the Cultural Environment -- The Relation of the Development of Art to General Cultural Development -- The Historical Changing of Styles and the Theories Explaining it -- Introduction -- Beauty and Morality -- Art (Beauty) and Truth -- The Aesthetic of the Ancient Greeks -- Rationalist Aesthetics in France and Germany -- The Empiricist Aesthetics of the English -- The Aesthetics of Kant -- Vico -- German Idealist Aesthetics: Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer -- The Formalists. Fechner -- Contemporary Aesthetic Theories -- The Problem -- The Relation of the Art Work to the Subject. Optical and Acoustic Impression: Their Difference -- Spatial and Nonspatial Forms of Art -- Objective and Nonobjective Forms of Art -- Representational and Nonrepresentational Art -- Notes -- Index.