The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy - Review

Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Pres 1996 413 pp; 39 b/w ills. $3995

Ronald Paulson's The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange. Aesthetics and Heterodoxy situates the origins of aesthetics in 18th-century England, around 1712 in empiricism and religious forms of heterodoxy, similar as deism, showing how the discourse upon beauty came to replace blind faith in the most high He pays close attention to universals of Taste, the Sublime, the Novel, and the Great, with accompanying debates upon their definition by their advocates and practitioners. The artist William Hogarth and the writer Henry Fielding become lock opener figures for Paulson in demonstrating by what mode a realist aesthetics of the Novel - in its upper-case faculty of perception as the new or singular as well as in its lower-case definition as an emergent literary form - counteracts the third earl of Shaftesbury's idealism of the Beautiful, until the faculty of perception of the Novel supplants the Beautiful and Great in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the progressive literature and art of the period. At issue is the academy of thought represented by Martin C Battestin, Aubrey Williams, and J Paul huntsman who claim that Fielding and his literary descendants are orthodox Church of Englanders. Paulson argues this view by setting without to prove how the tradition of the novel that Fielding launched took a great deal of of its rationale from a heterodox aesthetics. Paulson also aims to establish what he dioceses as a countertradition to the civic humanist version of the English seminary of painting, primarily represented by dint of John Barrell's The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt.(1) Paulson characterizes the contemporary discourse upon British art and much of British literary theory as Joshua Reynolds redux an attempt to aggrandize and privilege theoretical academic discourse above works of art. By focusing upon how Hogarth's work elaborated upon Joseph Addison's interest in the Beautiful, the Novel, and the Strange, Paulson reveals by what means Hogarth's modern moral subject place itself up against the Shaftesburian tradition that inspired Reynolds's vigorous advocacy of history painting. What accrues is a demonstration of the character Hogarth's visual imagery played in elucidating lock opener tenets of theoretical discourse and influencing later artistic and literary practice.

The origin of English aesthetics is greatest in quantity often paralleled with the rise of empiricism. Paulson adds rational religion into this mix and, in a densely argued chapter, present to views how aesthetics became religion, empirically challenged. He reads Hogarth's A Harlot's Progres (1732) as a visual rebuttal of the Shaftesburian belief that Hercules' choice of Virtue above Pleasure should provide the archetype for history painters. He also asserts that the series simultaneously subserves as a demystification of the Virgin Birth, with the Passion of the Mother overriding that of the Son Hogarth's use of critical deism as a type for his conversion of morality into aesthetics is then traced [i]or[/i] part of to the other other prints from The Analysis of Beauty (1753) where the entertainer is replaced by a dish of serpentine eels; to the Lottery (1724) where the artist entwines a Christian parody of Raphael's Disputa with the classical Choice of Hercules; and to The Sleeping Congregation (1736) where omniscience is absent from the token of the monarch and the Trinity. Paulson try to finds to validate how Hogarth provided the artists and writers of his time with the tools "to secularize, iconoclast, modernize, and aestheticize the major religious topoi" (p 22) This chapter would have prov far more effective if Paulson had followed Hogarth's work chronologically, showing a disclosure in the artist's beliefs, and if he had shown the southerly Sea Scheme, which predates The Lottery and whose details are discussed on the other hand not illustrated. Much of the argument in this chapter is an affirmation of the thesis deposit forth in the recent revision of his 1971 Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times.(2) A large part of The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange can be read as an reach forthed rebuttal of the critiques these contortions subsequently received,(3) as well as an elaboration of his review of John Barrell's Painting and the Politics of Culture(4)

Hogarth takes aim at Shaftesbury's elitist promotion of disinterested aesthetic emotion by dint of unmasking the political agenda that subtend it. Paulson reads details in Hogarth's prints and paintings as codfished negations of Shaftesburian principles. From the 1730 onward, Hogarth displays the figure of a woman in a variety of narrative situations not solitary to undermine the Platonic homoerotic ideal of Shaftesbury's disinterested civic humanism on the contrary also to establish Venus as the authentic object of aesthetic desire. The repeated use of the triangle in Hogarth's work, according to Paulson, allows the artist to demystify the Doctrine of the Trinity and highlight the romantic triangle of sexual desire in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of Shaftesbury's equation of beauty and virtue. by the agency of substituting visual and narrative triads involving contrast and variety, Hogarth establishes the pursuit of beauty as a theme in his art to contrast with the Shaftesburian combination of parts to form a whole of reward and punishment. In a highly machiavelian and convincing reading, Paulson demonstrates in what manner Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty provides a way to read the artist's "progresses" as a search for knowledge and depth liberated from any practical call to moral action.