During the past decades, it has been de rigueur in American Studies to approach the aesthetic suspiciously, as a vehicle for ideology. Recently, however, scholars have begun to recover the aesthetic from different disciplinary angles. The present volume brings together leading and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States of America to critically assess, and contribute to, the return of the aesthetic to the field. It does so by considering this return in the context of the aestheticization of the lifeworld. Contributors reexamine popular culture in an age of aesthetic capitalism and explore the aestheticization of (democratic) politics. They make forays into a practical aesthetics that thinks with rather than about art. They test whether aesthetic autonomy continues to have purchase, what the aesthetic forecloses, and how it has been turning against itself in the search for negative freedom. This volume of REAL thus intervenes in one the most heated debates in the field of American Studies of the current moment.