Aesthetics in English Literature

Contents: Preface. 1. Aesthetic Redemption. 2. The Bourgeois Cultural Revolution. 3. The economics of living poetically. 4. Mythic consciousness. 5. The Rise of Lyric in the eighteenth century and Aesthetics. 6. Transcendent Aesthetics and the dialectic pentad. 7. Contemplative sublimity and social action in Mary Anne Schimmelphenninck’s Aesthetics. 8. Aesthetics Theory and the Profession of Literature. 9. The Restoration and Eighteenth Century. Bibliography. Index.

Aesthetics, also spelled esthetics, is the study of theories that apply to the arts in a broad and fundamental way. Aesthetics, which was not used as a term until after the 1750s, has been a matter of thoughtful discussion and disagreement for many centuries. In the Kantian system, although the aesthetics occupies its own distinct space as the self-standing Third Critique, the ethical inhabits it and haunts it, most obviously in the theory of the sublime. Throughout the nineteenth century writers, painters, and musicians allow themselves to be inhabited or haunted by their immediate predecessors and contemporaries; the notion of sympathy is not some vague formula, but amounts to the very \'etat d\' esprit that presides over artistic creation as such.