Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: CRITICISM AND TRADITION
- GENRES
- LANGUAGE AND STYLE
- THEMES AND MOVEMENTS
- LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
- 26 Literature and philosophy
- 27 The psychology of literary creation and literary response
- 28 Taste and aesthetics
- 29 Literature and the other arts
- 30 Classical scholarship and literary criticism
- 31 Biblical scholarship and literary criticism
- 32 Science and literary criticism
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
28 - Taste and aesthetics
from LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: CRITICISM AND TRADITION
- GENRES
- LANGUAGE AND STYLE
- THEMES AND MOVEMENTS
- LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
- 26 Literature and philosophy
- 27 The psychology of literary creation and literary response
- 28 Taste and aesthetics
- 29 Literature and the other arts
- 30 Classical scholarship and literary criticism
- 31 Biblical scholarship and literary criticism
- 32 Science and literary criticism
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
With the possible exception of historians of the sublime, scholars rarely compare the contemporaneous contributions of Shaftesbury and Addison to eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics. Despite considerable overlap between the political and literary circles in which they worked and travelled, there appears to be no direct biographical connection. There are major differences of focus, tone, subject-matter, and intellectual temperament in their work. Shaftesbury, whose three-volume collection of essays, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, was published in 1711, seems to address himself to fellow gentlemen virtuosi; while Addison, whose writing appears largely in The Tatler and The Spectator, addresses the audience 'in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses' Yet the critical enterprises of Shaftesbury and Addison and their efforts to define a role for the critic have much in common, especially in so far as each is concerned with ‘the public taste’.
Shaftesbury, perhaps most ostentatiously, played critic to himself in the Miscellaneous Reflections he published on his own treatises in the Characteristicks. He creates a commentator to act as ‘critic and interpreter to this new writer’ (II, p. 161); but, describing his goals in his essay, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, Shaftesbury writes of himself: ‘His pretence has been to advise authors and polish styles, but his aim has been to correct manners and regular lives. He has affected soliloquy, as pretending only to censure himself, but he has taken occasion to bring others into his company’ (II, p. 2, 72). This aim is consistent with Addison's critical and journalistic enterprise.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 633 - 680Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
References
, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘On the nature and delineation of beauty in art and philosophy: Lessing's responses to William Hogarth and Edmund Burke’, in , and (eds.), Tradition and Creation. Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson (Leeds, 1978).Google Scholar
, Aesthetica (Trajecti cis viadrum [Frankfurt-on-the-Oder], 1750, 1758, rpt Hildesheim, 1961).Google Scholar
, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Halle, 1735); and (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954); , (Hamburg, 1983).Google Scholar
, Theoretische Ästhetik. Die grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der ‘Aesthetica’ (1750; 1758), trans. [into German] and ed. , (Hamburg, 1983).Google Scholar
, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (London, 1951).Google Scholar
, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757).Google Scholar
, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. and (Princeton, 1951; German original: Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, Tübingen, 1932).Google Scholar
, ‘Littérature et esthétique’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 264 (1989).Google Scholar
, Diderot und die Aufklärung. Aufsätze zur europäischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1972).Google Scholar
, Schiller's ‘Kalliasbriefe’ and the Study of his Aesthetic Theory, Anglica Germanica, 12 (The Hague and Paris, 1969).Google Scholar
, Kunst als Erkenntnis. Die Rolle der Sinnlichkeit in der Ästhetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens, Studia Leibnitiana, 9 (Wiesbaden, 1972).Google Scholar
, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1979).Google Scholar
, ‘Addison on ornament and poetic style’, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800, ed. and (Minneapolis, 1967).Google Scholar
, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature from Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe (Cambridge, MA, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. (17 vols., Berlin, 1903–20; rpt Berlin, 1968) (abbreviated as GS).Google Scholar
, ‘Of Eloquence’, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (London, 1741), in Philosophical Works, ed. and (4 vols., London, 1886; rpt Aalen, 1964), III.Google Scholar
, ‘Zur Ästhetik des jungen Herder’, in (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–1803 (Hamburg, 1987).Google Scholar
, Die Ästhetik als Antwort auf das kopernikanische Weltbild. Die Beziehungen zwischen den Naturwissenschaften und der Ästhetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens und Georg Friedrich Meiers, Philosophische Texte und Studien, 10 (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York, 1984).Google Scholar
, Kommentierende Einführung in Baumgartens Aesthetica. Zur Entstehung der wissenschaftlichen Ästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Hildesheim and New York, 1980).Google Scholar
, ‘The association of ideas and critical theory: Hobbes, Locke, and Addison’, ELH, 12 (1945).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens GA, 1985).Google Scholar
, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. et al. (Berlin, 1929; rpt, contd and ed. , Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt, 1971ff.).Google Scholar
, Rhetorische Überlieferung und Dichtungstheorie im frühen 18. Jahrhundert. Studien zu Gottsched, Breitinger und Georg Friedrich Meier (Munich, 1985).Google Scholar
, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, 1960).Google Scholar
, Poesie und Einbildungskraft. Zur Dichtungstheorie Wilhelm von Humboldts. Mit der deutschsprachigen Ausgabe eines Aufsatzes Humboldts für Frau von Staël [Essais Esthétiques (1799), including French original] (Stuttgart, 1967).Google Scholar
(ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar
(ed.), ‘Laocoon in Germany: the reception of the group since Winckelmann’, Oxford German Studies, 10 (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Les Théories esthétiques en Allemagne de Baumgarten à Kant (Paris, 1955). trans. Kunst– und Dichtungstheorien zwischen Aufklärung und Klassik (Berlin, 1960).Google Scholar
, Die Ästhetik A. G. Baumgartens und ihre Beziehung zum Ethischen, , 9 (Berlin, 1934).Google Scholar
, ‘Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Seine Bedeutung und Stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffschen Philosophie und seine Beziehungen zu Kant’ (containing a copy of the lecture-notes of Baumgarten's lectures on aesthetics) (Diss. Leipzig, 1907).Google Scholar
, ‘Die Einbürgerung der Ästhetik in der deutschen Sprache des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts oder Baumgarten und seine Wirkung’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 37 (1993).Google Scholar
, ‘Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) und die Verbreitung der Ästhetik’, in Geschichtlichkeit und Gegenwart. Festschrift für Hans Dietrich Irmscher zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. and (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1994).Google Scholar
, ‘The “naturalisation” of the term “Asthetik” in eighteenth-century German: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and his impact’, Modern Language Review, 89 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Die Ästhetik A. G. Baumgartens unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Meditationes, nebst einer Übersetzung dieser Schrift, Bausteine zur Geschichte der neueren deutschen Literatur, 21 (Halle, 1928).Google Scholar
, ‘Ästhetik, ästhetisch’, in (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel and Stuttgart, 1977), I, columns 555–71.Google Scholar
, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, ed., trans. and intro. by and (Oxford, 1967).Google Scholar
, Ästhetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis. Eine Interpretation der ‘Aesthetica’ A. G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe des lateinischen Textes und deutscher Übersetzung (Basel and Stuttgart, 1973).Google Scholar
, Disciplina Aesthetica. Zur Frühgeschichte der ästhetischen Theorie bei Baumgarten und Herder, Forschungen und Berichte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, 45 (Stuttgart, 1990).Google Scholar
, ‘Schillers Kallias-Briefe oder über die Objektivität der Schönheit’, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 18 (1977).Google Scholar
, ‘Shaftesbury's last commission’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19 (1956).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. Shewing the Unreasonableness of Prescribing to Other Men Faith, and the Inequity of Persecuting Differing Opinions (London, 1648).Google Scholar
, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, vol. I: The Later Eighteenth Century (London, 1955).Google Scholar
, ‘Die Erfahrung des Urteils. Warum Kant keine Ästhetik begründet hat’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 64 (1990).Google Scholar
, ‘Goethe's conception of form’, in and (eds.), Goethe. Poet and Thinker (London, 1962).Google Scholar