Reclaiming the aesthetic, emphasizing the "literary" in literary studies, conceptualizing a new formalism: such recent appeals represent the latest turn in ongoing debates about art and aesthetic ideology. Intervening in these debates—often characterized by predictable oppositions that set art against social action, structure against cultural practice, and the so-called imaginaries of affect against the putative reality of politics—this special issue of American Literature asks, what's new about the "new aesthetics," and what implications does this shifting ideology have for social and cultural thinking?