Literary and Aesthetic Theory

This chapter surveys the eighteenth-century origins of aesthetics as an increasingly important strand of literary criticism. Major poets became more frequently subject to examination in the light of concepts such as “beauty”; the treatment of art as a topic for moral thought gave a more polite, philosophical, turn to the hitherto raucous and satirical character of early eighteenth-century critical practice. The chapter examines the development of thought about form and psychology encouraged by seventeenth-century French criticism, Addison, Shaftesbury, and later writers and thinkers such as Burke, who presaged the gothic. Particular attention is given such theorists and philosophers as Hume, Alison and Gerard, together with other Scots theorists of “belles lettres.” The discussion charts the increasing influence on criticism of such terms as “sublime,” “taste,” “genius,” “originality,” “imagination, and “art” itself. An important element in the chapter is the place of creative writers, such as Pope, Joseph Warton, and Edward Young, as aesthetic theorists, in Pope’s case in poetry itself. Nor is the period’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson, immune to the vocabulary or aesthetics. The contribution of visual artists is illustrated by the writings of Hogarth and Reynolds, while a final section examines theory’s relation to practice.