Boyhood Aesthetics

Imperial boyhood: piracy and the play ethic.

Representations of perpetual boyhood came to fascinate the late Victorians, partly because such images could naturalize a new spirit of imperial aggression and new policies of preserving power. This article traces the emergence of this fantasy through a series of stories about the relationship of the boy and the pirate, figures whose opposition in mid-Victorian literature was used to articulate...

Engineering Aesthetics and Ergo-Aesthetics:

Human factors researchers and practitioners have been focusing research attention on the easeof-use, productivity, safety, comfort, and effectiveness aspects of product and system design. This article argues that it is time that we add another important dimension to the fields of human factors research and practice—the aesthetic dimension. This article discusses the need for the establishment o...

Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics

[ ] 1 Aesthetics

There is perhaps no more vexing, fraught, and neglected concept in the study of children's literature than aesthetics. No doubt the neglect of a serious, theoretical inquiry into the aesthetics of children's literature stems from our contemporary understandings of the discipline of children's literature itself. The study of children's literature has, historically, been the work of librarians an...

Computing Aesthetics

Aesthetic judgment is one of the most valued human characteristics, being regarded as a remarkable display of intelligence. Popular knowledge tells us that it is purely cultural. In this paper, we present a brief theory according to which aesthetics depends on biological and cultural issues, namely on visual image processing. We present an implementation of this theory and the experimental resu...