Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and Its Academies

by Thomas Docherty

This book argues that from the late seventeenth century to the present national cultures have sought to regulate the democratic subject through the academic form of arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. It offers a radical reconsideration of the history of modernity, tracing the emergence of criticism as a socio-cultural practice across all the major European nations, and drawing on an extensive range of European literature and philosophy.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Professor Thomas Docherty is Emeritus Professor of English and of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick