The British Aesthetic Tradition From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein is the first single volume to offer readers a comprehensive and systematic history of aesthetics in Britain from its inception in the early eighteenth century to major developments in Britain and beyond in the late twentieth century. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, and is divided into three parts. The first part, The Age of Taste, covers the eighteenth-century approaches of internal sense theorists, imagination theorists and associationists. The second, The Age of Romanticism, takes readers from debates over the picturesque through British Romanticism to late Victorian criticism. The third, The Age of Analysis, covers early twentieth-century theories of Formalism and Expressionism to conclude with Wittgenstein and a number of views inspired by his thought.

Introduction: a brief history of 'aesthetics'; Part I. The Age of Taste: 1. Internal sense theorists; 2. Imagination theorists; 3. Associationist theorists; Part II. The Age of Romanticism: 4. The picturesque; 5. Wordsworth and the early Romantics; 6. Victorian criticism; Part III. The Age of Analysis: 7. Theories of expression; 8. Wittgenstein and afterwards.

Timothy M. Costelloe is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of William and Mary. In 2003 and 2006 he was a Humboldt Fellow at Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. He is author of Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (2007) and editor of The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and his work has appeared in a variety of edited collections and scholarly journals.