Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1995. In The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, Ronald Paulson fills a lacuna in studies of aesthetics at its point of origin in England in the 1700s. He shows how aesthetics took off not only from British empiricism but also from such forms of religious heterodoxy as deism. The third earl of Shaftesbury, the founder of aesthetics, replaced the Christian God of rewards and punishments with beautyworship of God, with a taste for a work of art. William Hogarth, reacting against Shaftesbury's disinterestedness, replaced his Platonic abstractions with an aesthetics centered on the human body, gendered female, and based on an epistemology of curiosity, pursuit, and seduction. Paulson shows Hogarth creating, first in practice and then in theory, a middle area between the Beautiful and the Sublime by adapting Joseph Addison's category (in the Spectator) of the Novel, Uncommon, and Strange. Paulson retrieves an aesthetics that had strong support during the eighteenth cent
Trade ReviewThis is a remarkable and important book, one that scholars will be learning from for a long time and that critics and theorists of the arts will want to ponder for its interventions into the basic questions of aesthetics, ideology, and the relation of artistic theory and practice. It will certainly spark a much-needed debate in the complacent circles of British art history, one that will fruitfully cut across the familiar battle lines between 'left' and 'right,' 'theorists' and 'historians,' 'scholars' and 'critics.'.
—W. J. T. Mitchell, Editor,
Critical InquiryTable of ContentsPreface
Chapter 1. Aesthetics and Deism
Chapter 2. Shaftesburian Disinterestedness
Chapter 3. Addison's Aesthetics of the Novel
Chapter 4. The Conversation Piece: Politeness and Subversion
Chapter 5. The "Great Creation": Fielding
Chapter 6. Aesthetics and Erotics: Cleland, Fielding, and Sterne
Chapter 7. The Strange, Trivial, and Infantile: Books for Children
Chapter 8. From Novel co Strange to "Sublime"
Chapter 9. From Novel to Picturesque
Chapter 10. The Novelizing of Hogarth
Illustrations
Notes
Ackowledgments
Index
