Edinburgh University Press

Focussing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the author traces the emergence of a critical aesthetics of judgment in a group of writers - often hard to place in the 'between' of modernism and contemporary writing - including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and Martha Gellhorn.

Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century