The beautiful, novel, and strange : aesthetics and heterodoxy / Ronald Paulson.

Main entry:

Paulson, Ronald, 1930-2024.

Title & Author:

The beautiful, novel, and strange : aesthetics and heterodoxy / Ronald Paulson.

Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Description:

xix, 369 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-355) and index.
Aesthetics and deism -- Shaftesburian disinterestedness -- Addison's aesthetics of the novel -- The conversation piece : politeness and subversion -- The "Great Creation" : Fielding -- Aesthetics and erotics : Cleland, Fielding, and Sterne -- The strange, trivial and infantile : books for children -- From novel to strange to "sublime" -- From novel to picturesque -- The novelizing of Hogarth.

Summary:

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 beauty - worship 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 century but has been obscured both by the more dominant academic discourse of Shaftesbury (and later Sir Joshua Reynolds) and by current trends in art and literary history. Arguing that the two traditions comprised not only painterly but also literary theory and practice, Paulson explores the innovations of Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith, which followed and complemented the practice in the visual arts of Hogarth and his followers.

Resources:
Table of contents
Contributor biographical information
Publisher description

ISBN:

0801851718 (hc ; alk. paper)
9780801851711 (hc ; alk. paper)

Subject:

English fiction 18th century History and criticism.
Art and literature Great Britain History 18th century.
Aesthetics, British 18th century.
Literature and society Great Britain History 18th century.
Fiction Technique.
Roman anglais 18e siècle Histoire et critique.
Art et littérature Grande-Bretagne Histoire 18e siècle.
Esthétique britannique 18e siècle.
Littérature et société Grande-Bretagne Histoire 18e siècle.
Aesthetics, British
Art and literature
English fiction
Literature and society
Engels.
Letterkunde.
Esthetica.
Esthétique Grande-Bretagne 18e siècle.
Littérature anglaise 18e siècle Histoire et critique.
Art et littérature Grande-Bretagne 18e siècle.
Littérature et société Grande-Bretagne 18e siècle.
Great Britain
Visual arts Aesthetics

Form/genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History

Holdings:

Location: Library main 121603
Call No.: ID PR858.A7 P3; ID:96-B735
Status: Available

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