Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820

This book replaces the affect- or spectator-orientated aesthetics of Addison, Burke, Payne, Knight, on through Weiskel with an aesthetics based on the making - the work or the labour - of the artist. It does this by describing the principles of making art, of breaking previous "idolatrous" art, and remaking this art, and of filling in various ways the gap left by the breakage. Paulson lays out what he calls an aesthetics of Georgic renewal, of iconoclasm, of mourning, of possession (or property), and of revolution and restoration. These are presented as a sequence in time, running from the Restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution, from the poetry of Pope to that of Byron and Wordsworth, and from the art of Hogarth to that of Reynolds, Stubbs, Gainsborough, and Constable.;In this way, the book traces changes in the two diciplines of poetry and painting, demonstrating how poems depend on and undermine earlier poems and paintings. The object is to trace how, in the broadest sense, culture enters into aesthetic practice.