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Elizabeth Swann investigates the relationship between the physical sense of taste and taste as a figurative term associated with knowledge and judgment in early modern literature and culture. She argues that - unlike aesthetic taste in the eighteenth century - discriminative taste was entwined with embodied experience in this period. Although taste was tarnished by its associations with Adam and Eve's fall from Eden, it also functioned positively, as a source of useful, and potentially redemptive, literary, spiritual, experimental, and intersubjective knowledge. Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England juxtaposes canonical literary works by authors such as Shakespeare with a broad range of medical, polemical, theological, philosophical, didactic, and dietetic sources. In doing so, the book reveals the central importance of taste to the experience and articulation of key developments in the literate, religious, and social cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

How are the aesthetics of fear politically mobilised & politically mobilising? This article directs this question to a specific series of events beginning with the bombing of the London transportation system on 7/7, the near repeat performance of this event on 7/21, & the 'Shoot to Kill to Protect' policy's first application which resulted in the killing of electrician Jean Charles de Menezes on 7/22. In particular, it addresses itself to one specific aestheticisation of fear, the images posted on the website Werenotafraid.com & the incessant circulation & discussion of these images since 7/7. The article argues that the asetheticisation of the London bombings through this specific website illustrates the often overlooked second movement in the Kantian sublime: the movement from rupture to a restoration of order & of closure. What interests me are the aesthetic strategies by which Werenotafraid.com effects a restoration of order & gives closure to the breakdown of the British imagination, of not only national security but also unity. This article first traces the reliance of these aesthetic strategies on a Kantian morality. It then explains how these Kantian-inflected strategies repair the breakdown of the British imagination of security through a very specific 'panhuman' restoration of British unity. Finally, it analyses the failures of the Werenotafraid.com project, politically & morally. Figures. Adapted from the source document.

We most commonly encounter the word defiance when used as an adverb to classify a peculiarly courageous or risky act of resistance. However, the use of the word defiance in this way is a departure from the historical meaning of the word. Moreover, it occludes the possibility that there exists political activity that is manifestly defiant. The article takes issue with this tendency and identifies a mode of resistance that is explicitly defiant. In order to do this, the paper draws from the phenomenological approach underpinning the standing sculptures of the British sculptor Antony Gormley. This informs an exploration of the protest enacted by the standing man of Taksim Square, who participated in a large antigovernment movement in Turkey in 2013. In acts we might distinguish as defiant, the paper demonstrates the materialist vulnerability of the protesting body, the aesthetic ontology at work, the prevalence of the standing metaphor, the role of silence, and the absence of futurity. By unearthing defiant modes of protest, the heterogeneity of resistance is affirmed, and a new domain where art encounters the political is revealed.

Book review of: Reverberations across small-scale British theatre: politics, aesthetics and forms, edited by Patrick Duggan and Victor Ukaegbu. Bristol: Intellect; ISBN 9781783202973 (£35.00) ; Publisher PDF