Aesthetic Criticism

Aesthetic criticism has suffered a poor reputation over the last 120 years. Often dismissing it in the form of caricature, a wave of the hand at “mere aestheticism” with its apparently dogma of “art for art’s sake”, we rarely take it seriously as an approach to art today, and lose sight of its importance in its own time. This book, however, offers an account of aesthetic criticism as a far more rigorous approach to art, literature, and philosophy than is often thought. By considering the principles of aesthetic criticism on their own terms, this book provides a revised understanding of what the approach was, and what it might offer us today. In four chapters, it provides an account of the main areas of concern of aesthetic criticism: the appreciation of form and sensuality, the question of artistic value, the negotiation between texts and their contexts, and the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and metaphysics. These are some of the central concerns in all forms of criticism, and by returning to the critical work of Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, or Arthur Symons – to name some examples – we can find crucial tools with which to approach them.