{"product_id":"the-beautiful-novel-and-strange-9781421430560","title":"The Beautiful Novel and Strange","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally 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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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.'.\u003cbr\u003e—W. J. T. Mitchell, Editor, \u003ci\u003eCritical Inquiry\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ePreface\u003cbr\u003eChapter 1. Aesthetics and Deism \u003cbr\u003eChapter 2. Shaftesburian Disinterestedness \u003cbr\u003eChapter 3. Addison's Aesthetics of the Novel \u003cbr\u003eChapter 4. The Conversation Piece: Politeness and Subversion \u003cbr\u003eChapter 5. The \"Great Creation\": Fielding \u003cbr\u003eChapter 6. Aesthetics and Erotics: Cleland, Fielding, and Sterne \u003cbr\u003eChapter 7. The Strange, Trivial, and Infantile: Books for Children \u003cbr\u003eChapter 8. From Novel co Strange to \"Sublime\" \u003cbr\u003eChapter 9. From Novel to Picturesque \u003cbr\u003eChapter 10. The Novelizing of Hogarth \u003cbr\u003eIllustrations \u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eAckowledgments\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Johns Hopkins University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49408130154839,"sku":"9781421430560","price":38.7,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781421430560.jpg?v=1730501695","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-beautiful-novel-and-strange-9781421430560","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}