In recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.

Empowered by neo-Darwinian theory and recent advances in neuroscientific research, nascent academic fields have particularly challenged the humanities' non-empirical and largely speculative approach to modern art, culture, and aesthetic theory. In its stead, evolutionary scholars advocate a strict biological functionalism that effectively reduces mind to brain and art to science. Unfortunately, humanities' scholars so far have been slow to respond to this challenge. This work remedies this problem by providing the first comprehensive account of current evolutionary and neuroscientific approaches to art and human culture to show both the need for and the limits of interdisciplinary research in the humanities.

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

The Arts and the Brain: Psychology and Physiology beyond Pleasure, Volume 237, combines the work of an excellent group of experts who explain evidence on the neural and biobehavioral science of the arts. Topics covered include the emergence of early art and the evolution of human culture, the interaction between cultural and biological evolutionary processes in generating artistic creation, the nature of the aesthetic experience of art, the arts as a multisensory experience, new insights from the neuroscience of dance, a systematic review of the biological impact of music, and more. Builds bridges and makes new connections between neuroscientists, psychologists and the arts world Unravels the neural, neuroendocrine, physiological, hormonal and evolutionary dimensions of the arts Contains chapters from true authorities in the field

Traditional fine arts are often regarded as rarefied, something accessed by the uniquely talented and displayed in impressive museums or on lavish stages. Art thusly conceived is something that most people never practice in their lives. Yet in day-to-day life we all experience creative satisfaction through interaction with the physical and social environment that is a form of artistic practice. In Transformative Arts: Biological, Digital, and Everyday Aesthetics, Gary A. Berg explores what we gain through understanding ways to live imaginative lives and considers the increasingly important collaborative role of computers and interaction with nature.

Showcasing the most exciting contemporary scholarship on D. H. Lawrence, this comprehensive collection serves as both an overview of the field at present as well as an examination of new approaches and directions in D. H. Lawrence studies. Explicitly interdisciplinary in its focus and covering fields such as Bibliotherapy, sustainability and animal studies, this book: · Provides new insights into Lawrence as a transnational figure whose work responds to global cultures; · Considers Lawrence in light of broader developments within modernist studies; · Examines Lawrence's work in relation to material cultures and his engagements with print, publishing and literary networks. Contributors are comprised of established international experts in D. H. Lawrence studies as well as newer voices. This collection provides a comprehensive resource for literature students at all levels, from undergraduates and postgraduates to scholars and advanced readers interested in developing their knowledge of D. H. Lawrence.