The British Aesthetic Tradition

Offers a comprehensive account of British aesthetics from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century in Britain and beyond.

Taste and Experience in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics acknowledges theories of taste, beauty, the fine arts, genius, expression, the sublime and the picturesque in their own right, distinct from later theories of an exclusively aesthetic kind of experience. By drawing on a wealth of thinkers, including several marginalised philosophers, Dabney Townsend presents a novel reading of the century to challenge our understanding of art and move towards a unique way of thinking about aesthetics. Speaking of a proto-aesthetic, Townsend surveys theories of taste and beauty arising from the empiricist shift in philosophy. A proto-aesthetic was shaped by the philosophers who followed Locke and accepted that theories of taste and beauty must be products of experience alone. Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid were among the most important advocates, joined by others who re-thought traditional topics. Featuring chapters tracing its philosophical principles, issues raised by the subjectivity of the empiricist approach and the more academic proto-aesthetic formed toward the end of the century, Townsend argues that Lockean empiricism laid the foundations for what we now call aesthetics.

This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests. The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others. This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic. The Introduction and Chapters 2, 10, and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For over fifty years, philosophers working within the broader remit of analytic philosophy have developed and refined a substantial body of work in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, curating a core foundation of scholarship which offers rigor and clarity on matters of profound and perennial interest relating to art and all forms of aesthetic appreciation. Now in its second edition and thoroughly revised, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art—The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology captures this legacy in a comprehensive introduction to the core philosophical questions and conversations in aesthetics. Through 57 key essays selected by leading scholars Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, this anthology collects modern classics as well as new contributions on essential topics such as the identification and ontology of art, interpretation, values of art, art and knowledge, and fiction and the imagination. New to this edition are selections which treat aesthetic experience more widely, including essays on the aesthetics of nature and aesthetics in everyday life. Other carefully-chosen pieces analyze the practice and experience of specific art forms in greater detail, including painting, photography, film, literature, music, and popular art such as comics. This bestselling collection is an essential resource for students and scholars of aesthetics, designed to foster a foundational understanding of both long-standing and contemporary topics in the field.

Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and a newly created past. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment, with its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy. Set against the European Grand Tour, the British turned to the Domestic, Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, and alongside a classical literary heritage championed British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion that sanctioned an authoritarian politics that the Gothic Novel mocks. However, if empiricism and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain’s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes and a celebration of what would come to be known as the ‘fairy way of writing’.

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Early Modern Aesthetics is a concise and accessible guide to the history of aesthetics in the early modern period. J. Colin McQuillan shows how philosophers concerned with art and beauty positioned themselves with respect to the ancients and the moderns, how they thought the arts were to be distinguished and classified, the principles they proposed for art and literary criticism, and how they made aesthetics a part of philosophy in the eighteenth century. The book explores the controversies that arose among philosophers with different views on these issues, their relation to the philosophy, science, and art, and their legacy for contemporary aesthetics.

A groundbreaking study of the development of form in eighteenth-century aesthetics In this original work, Abigail Zitin proposes a new history of the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics. Her account substitutes women and artisans for the proverbial man of taste, asserting them as central figures in the rise of aesthetics as a field of philosophical inquiry in eighteenth-century Europe. She shows how the idea of formal abstraction so central to conceptions of beauty in this period emerges from the way practitioners think about craft and skill across the domestic, industrial, and so-called high arts. Zitin elegantly maps the complex connections among aesthetics, form, and formalism, drawing out the understated presence of practice in the writings of major eighteenth-century thinkers including Locke, Addison, Burke, and Kant. This new take on an old story ultimately challenges readers to reconsider form and why it matters.

Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century.