Introduction

Philipp Schweighauser (Göttingen)
Literature in Transition: European Aesthetics and the Early American Novel

Claude Ziltener (Basel)
The Death-Hymn of the Perfect Tree: Metaphor, Metamorphosis and the Sublimity of Music in R. W. Emerson’s Poems “Woodnotes I & II”

Henrik Otterberg (Gothenberg)
Immanence and Transcendence in Thoreau’s “A Winter Walk”

François Specq (Lyon)
Henry David Thoreau’s Journal or the Aesthetics of Spacing

Patrick H. Vincent (Neuchâtel)
Thoreau, Rousseau and the Aesthetics of Romantic Taxonomy

Jerusha McCormack (University College Dublin)
American Decadence: A New Field for Research

Agnieszka Soltysik (Lausanne)
Poe’s Aesthetics and American Modernism

Francesca de Lucia (Oxford)
Making America: The Narrative Aesthetics of the Early Italian American Novel

Hartwig Isernhagen (Basel)
Aesthetics of Violence / Violence of Aesthetics: Some Remarks on the Cultural Work of Aesthetics and Practices of Aestheticization in Late Twentieth-Century American Civilization

Martin Heusser (Zurich)
Et in Arcadia Ego: The Pastoral Aesthetics of Suburbia in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides

Franziska Gygax (Basel)
The Aesthetics of Illness: Narratives as Empowerment

Thomas Austenfeld (Fribourg)
Only Sensations Remain: The Hypertrophy of the Aesthetic in Philip Roth’s Everyman

Christina Ljungberg (Zurich)
Urban Aesthetics: Movement as Performative Utterance