Aesthetics is a field still rooted in an understanding of a unified process where small numbers of people produce, commodify, and consume objects called "art." Disunified Aesthetics deconstructs the literary object by invoking the critic's stance toward the written works with which they engage. Lynette Hunter's performative explorations provide a distinctly different way of understanding contemporary creative processes. Disunified Aesthetics takes up twenty-first-century aesthetics through an investigation of recent Canadian writing. The book is both a series of insights into literature and poetics of the last two decades and a story about moving from a traditional view of the relation between the artist, art, and its reception, to a more radically democratic view of aesthetics and ethics. Hunter addresses a range of Canadian women's writing, as well as close studies of the work of Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Nicole Brossard, Frank Davey, Alice Munro, Daphne Marlatt, and bpNichol. Disunified Aesthetics is a creative, challenging, and original investigation of textuality, performance, and aesthetics by a leading and innovative scholar.

Lynette Hunter is Distinguished Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at the University of Calfornia Davis.With a background in the study of rhetoric, philosophy and political theory, Lynette Hunter has conducted research into women’s history and feminism, printing and humanities computing, the history of science and medicine, decolonialism and Canadian Studies, and more recently into performance and practice. A Canadian who has worked primarily in the UK and in the USA, her work is significantly informed by what she has learned from indigenous ways of knowing and daoist epistemology. An early contributor to the Practice a Research pedagogy in Europe, she built the first Performance as Research doctoral program in the USA from 2003. Writer, co-writer and co-editor of 30 books including a performative criticism of Canadian writers Disunified Aesthetics (McGill Queens 2014), she has recently finished Politics of Practice: A Rhetoric of Performativity (Palgrave 2019), and is currently writing on the phenomenology of how performers presence the changes that happen when they interact with the materials of their trained practice.

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“Lynette Hunter’s work is a superb example of the advantage of crossing disciplinary lines and combining creativity with critical discourse. Extremely valuable for scholars of Canadian literature, theatre and performance, critical theory (in all contexts), and women’s studies, Disunified Aesthetics is a dynamic and compelling study that frequently manages to escape the confines of form.” Jane Koustas, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Brock University

“Hunter is looking to challenge the form of the conventional literary critical essay, to explore a "disunified aesthetics" that incorporates performance art pieces that are available online as website materials, or incorporated as typographic and visual a

“Disunified Aesthetics is quietly intelligent and brilliantly self-reflexive. There are books that document a period or a movement in late twentieth-century Canadian writing but none that offers as extensive a critical engagement with processes of reading