An account of Greek tragedy, it demonstrates how the elements of plot, character and spectacle combine to produce 'pity and fear' - and why we derive pleasure from this painful process. It introduces the crucial concepts of mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error') and katharsis, which have informed serious thinking about drama ever since.

Kant's Critique of Judgement analyses our experience of the beautiful and the sublime in relation to nature, morality, and theology. Meredith's classic translation is here lightly revised and supplemented with a bilingual glossary. The edition also includes the important First Introduction.

Presents an essay on aesthetics by one of the Japanese novelists. This text ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines a sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.

An eloquent and sometimes even erotic book, the Philosophical Enquiry was long dismissed as a piece of mere juvenilia. However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also one of the first major works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has fascinated ...

Theodor Adorno is the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the extraordinarily influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s. This book is his classic discussion of the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful 'Art is the sedimentation of human misery'.

This text contains two of Walter Benjamin's essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , and Theses on the Philosophy of History , as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust, and book collecting.

'On Beauty' is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times.

Parallel-text edition. Edited and translated by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby.

A summary of mediaeval aesthetic ideas, by Italian novelist and playwright Umberto Eco. Juxtaposing theology and science, poetry and mysticism, Eco explores the relationship that existed between the aesthetic theories and the artistic experience and practice of mediaeval culture.

A survey of modern Western philosophy, focusing on the relations between aesthetics, ethics and politics, which aims to be a critique of the concept of the aesthetic throughout modern Western thought.

When originally published in 1960, this was the first complete English translation since 1799 of Kant's early work on aesthetics. More literary than philosophical, Observations shows Kant as a man of feeling rather than the dry thinker he often seemed to readers of the three Critiques .

Christianity had compromised the immediacy of man's relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had alienated him from his deepest feelings. Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s, and stand as a passionately argued work that challenged the ability of art to respond to the modern world.

In this guide to the strategies of pretension in contemporary France, Bourdieu describes how class segments separate from each other by their contrasting attitudes towards art and beauty.

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to aesthetics for the general reader, with particular emphasis on literature.

Walter Pater is increasingly seen as an important precursor of modernist aesthetic theory. This work was one of the most influential pieces of cultural criticism of its day, particularly on the work of Oscar Wilde, who described it as my golden book ... the very flower of decadence .

One of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home. Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories and dreams. AVAILABLE NOW.

The follow-up to the seminal Ways of Seeing, one of the most influential books on art

Features the text in the great controversies over literature and art between thinkers who have become giants of 20th-century philosophy.

Examines the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death. This title offers an investigation into the nature of photographs.