Aesthetic Criticism: An Introduction

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 apparent dogma of ’art for art’s sake’, we rarely take it seriously as an approach to the arts 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 negotiation between artworks and their contexts, the question of artistic value, 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, Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Symons - to name some examples - we can find crucial tools with which to approach them.

James Dowthwaite is Junior Professor for British Literature and Culture at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His first book, Ezra Pound and 20th Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word (Routledge, 2019) won the Ezra Pound Society Book Award.