Presentation on “The Afterlife of Aesthetics”

On October 24th, Mark Algee-Hewitt presented "The Afterlife of Aesthetics."

The eighteenth-century gave both critics and authors a new vocabulary through which to both express and study aesthetic experience. Yet while we have many in-depth studies on the emergence of concepts like the sublime, our narratives do not take into account the multiple and overlapping ways that these ideas emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries and, more importantly, what happened to them in the nineteenth century. In this project, which lies at the heart of my forthcoming book, I use a combination of quantitative and critical methods on over 400,000 texts to trace a new history of the sublime across the two centuries between 1660 and 1860. The sublime, I argue, can best be defined as a pattern of language, a linked network of terms that cohere across the two centuries, and whose patterns persist in the literary and critical writing of the Romantic period and beyond.