Eighteenth-Century Life

In four new books on aesthetics in the eighteenth century, historicism is blended in striking ways with analytic philosophy, formalism, phenomenology, and the study of empire. Tom Huhn, in Imitation and Society, undertakes careful analyses of the development of aesthetic thought in the mid and late century, pursuing the history of ideas as it is rooted in both philosophical discourse and the ongoing play of social forces; Nigel Leask, in Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, Arnaud Maillet in The Claude Glass, and Virginia [End Page 97] Swain in Grotesque Figures are all concerned about the ways artistic practices function at the edges of aesthetic categories, whether in travel writing, the art of perspective, or the literature of the grotesque. All four authors encourage us to see how eighteenth-century aesthetics is at heart a discourse of mirroring and mimesis. For Huhn this means that early aesthetics posits a world where imitation is not just about the relation between art and nature, but also about the relation between an individual and society. In the acts of describing, evaluating, or replicating the objective world of the senses as a world subject to the dictates of taste, human subjects enter into and also create a world of agreement and of like-feeling. Eighteenth-century aesthetics absorbs and reworks classical and Renaissance poetics; and Huhn argues that we see part of this in "the Persistence of Mimesis" (his subtitle) and in the way that the philosophy of aesthetics requires the imitation and replication of nature but also the replication—in the mind and body of each person of taste—of the judgments, strictures, and relations that make up the social world. Leask investigates the ways in which the discourse of aesthetics is crucial to encounters between cultures that fail to mirror each other, or that mirror only with distortion. For Leask, an aesthetics of curiosity enables the representation of alien lands. For Maillet, actual mirrors and visual distortions take the central role, as he traces the effects of the Claude glass on ideas of perspective. Finally, Swain argues that the fin-de-siècle art of Baudelaire approaches aesthetics by way of imitation: quotation, appropriation, and revision link the eighteenth century to modern ideas of the position of art and artist. For all of these critics, the aesthetic becomes an epistemic domain.¹

In Imitation and Society, Tom Huhn—like Theodor Adorno, Terry Eagleton, and Isobel Armstrong before him—sets out to describe the ways in which the aesthetic mediates "the social," which for Huhn means, roughly, the totality of social relations. The domain of taste emerges alongside new concepts of subjectivity: early in the history of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the feeling, judging subject is defined by connoisseurship, disinterested attention, and what Shaftesbury calls common sense. At midcentury, for Burke the subject who matters is a feeling more than a judging one, and is defined in terms of the mimetic psychology of sympathy, and for Hogarth, by the rigorous practices of seeing he wishes his public to learn. At century's end, for Kant, the subject who feels beauty or senses the sublime becomes the model for the possibility of human judgment itself. Huhn sees mimesis as a figure both for the way abstract concepts bring the particular under the...