Ronald Paulson

William Hogarth

In the development of English aesthetics, William Hogarth's 'The Analysis of Beauty' takes a position of high significance. In this now classic edition, Ronald Paulson includes the complete text of the original work; an introduction that places the 'Analysis' in the tradition of aesthetic treatises and Hogarth's own 'moral' works; extensive annotation of the text and accompanying illustrations; and illuminating manuscript passages that Hogarth omitted from the final printed version. Hogarth's stature in his own time suggests the importance of his attempt to systematise and theorise his artistic practice. What he proposes is an aesthetics of the middle range, subordinating both the Beautiful and the Sublime to the everyday world of human choice and contingency - essentially the world of Hogarth's own 'modern moral subjects'. Ronal Paulson is Mayer Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of many books, including a biography of Hogarth, a catalogue of his engravings, and studies of Hogarth in the contexts of eighteenth-century painting, literature, and the British tradition of aesthetics.

The Analysis of Beauty

Presents information about the novellete, novella, etc.; presents a short biography of the author, and gives a translation of the work.

The Novelette Before 1900

The second volume in Paulson's definitive study of William Hogarth explores the peak of the artist's career, from A Harlot's Progress to The March of Finchley, and concentrates particularly on the production and consumption of his works. It plays out Hogarth's conflicting aims of producing a polite or popular art, for patrons or for the general public. It is also concerned with the central issue of Hogarth as painter and engraver. Hogarth recognised that the art market was changing. Personal patronage was declining, art works were being commercialised, and a huge new market was opening up. From his earliest professional training Hogarth had witnessed and participated in the employment of mechanical reproduction - printing and engraving - to create and extend cultural markets. The enterprising Hogarth set out to develop a new product corresponding to the expanding audience, especially appealing to those who wanted to maintain their own identity and not merely to emulate the upper class. Prints could now be seen in coffee houses and shop windows, therefore reaching an audience far beyond their owners. Art was no longer limited to the simple status of personal possession - this put in question the whole matter of property as it did of class. Hogarth's interests extended straight down from the dukes and princesses of his conversation pictures to the lowest denizens of the London underworld. Although he makes clear in his graphic works that his sympathies lay with the 'nobodies', at the same time his pictures, with their learned allusions and visual and verbal puns, also address themselves to an educated audience. He was at once both inside and outside the system. Volume II also focuses on Hogarth's relationship to the emergent literary form - the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Without Hogarth's graphic experiments of the 1730s, Richardson and Fielding would have written very differently

Hogarth: High art and low, 1732-1750

Ronald Marshall

Paulson shows how 18th-century English poets and artists confronted the decline of High Renaissance ideals in literary theory and aesthetics. The book is less a single extended argument, though, than a collection of brilliant insights and interpretations: Pope as Ovidian poet; Joseph Wright as Shandyan artist. Especially stimulating are the readings of Hogarth, Wright, Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Constable that comprise the second half of the book. Except for the deconstructionist jargon, the discussions are lucid and compelling. Highly recommended for libraries supporting graduate programs in literature or art.

Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820

Breaking and Remaking

Taking Swift as his main example, Paulson examines the dualism of satire in its most interesting and ambiguous modes, and as the embodiment of rhetorical devices that are as complex mimetically as they are rhetorically.

The Fictions of Satire

This final volume of Paulson's magnificent biography takes Hogarth from his fifty-third year to his death at sixty-seven. The period opens with Hogarth at the height of his powers; a figure of influence with the literary generation of Richardson and Fielding, he was known to an unprecedented spectrum of English men and women. At this point, Hogarth chose to philosophise about art, extending his successful practice in aesthetic theory, in The Analysis of Beauty, partly in reaction to the agitation for an art academy based on the French model, partly out of the conviction that his art required verbal validation, and partly (some contemporaries felt) out of hubris. And at the same moment, the hard won fabric of his reputation began to unravel. A new generation had arisen, some friendly and interested in building on Hogarth's achievement, but some determined to supersede what seemed to be, in England of the 1750s, too insular a figure to represent English art and culture to the world. Theconsequences - given his own doggedness and the shifting allegiances of former friends - were tumultuous and darkened the last years of Hogarth's life, pushing him to extremes of theory, practise and self-justification. For the first time in his career he found himself apparently out of step with his times. Although these cannot be called happy years, they elicited form Hogarth some of his most brilliant and audacious works, in writing as well as painting and engraving. In many ways he had already, by 1750, anticipated the Reynold's generation pointing the way into the Promised Land, but disagreeing over the nature of that promise. More than the earlier two volumes, Art and Politics focuses on the reception of Hogarth and his works. The paranoid strain in Hogarth responded to the notion of being attacked; and this also reflected his increasing fear of the general audience he had himself helped to create as no longer a public but a crowd.

Hogarth: Art and politics, 1750-1764

Arguing that the two traditions comprised not only painterly but literary theory and practice, Paulson explores the innovations of Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith, which followed and complemented the practice in the visual arts of Hogarth and his followers.

Aesthetics and Heterodoxy

The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange

The 1990s brought surprising industrial development in emerging economies around the globe: firms in countries not previously known for their high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new Information Technologies (IT) by using different business models and carving out unique positions in the global IT production networks. In this book Dan Breznitz asks why economies of different countries develop in different ways, and his answer relies on his exhaustive research into the comparative experiences of Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland--states that made different choices to nurture the growth of their IT industries. The role of the state in economic development has changed, Breznitz concludes, but it has by no means disappeared. He offers a new way of thinking about state-led rapid-innovation-based industrial development that takes into account the ways production and innovation are now conducted globally. And he offers specific guidelines to help states make advantageous decisions about research and development, relationships with foreign firms and investors, and other critical issues.

Moral Values in Literature

Sin and Evil

Thomas Lockwood

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Critical Heritage

Henry Fielding

Each chapter in this intriguing book by one of the world's leading authorities on Henry Fielding begins with an annotated chronology of the known facts, followed by analyses of the important issues. Paulson's account must be essential reading to all admirers and serious students of Fielding and his work.

The Life of Henry Fielding

Seldom has a single book, much less a translation, so deeply affected English literature as the translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote in 1612. The comic novel inspired drawings, plays, sermons, and other translations, making the name of the Knight of la Mancha as familiar as any folk character in English lore. In this comprehensive study of the reception and conversion of Don Quixote in England, Ronald Paulson highlights the qualities of the novel that most attracted English imitators. The English Don Quixote was not the same knight who meandered through Spain, or found a place in other translations throughout Europe. The English Don Quixote found employment in all sorts of specifically English ways, not excluding the political uses to which a Spanish fool could be turned. According to Paulson, a major impact of the novel and its hero was their stimulation of discussion about comedy itself, what he calls the "aesthetics of laughter." When Don Quixote reached England he did so at the time of the rise of empiricism, and adherents of both sides of the empiricist debate found arguments and evidence in the behavior and image of the noble knight. Four powerful disputes battered around his grey head: the proximity of madness and imagination; the definition of the beautiful; the cruelty of ridicule and its laughter; and the role of reason in the face of madness. Paulson's engaging account leads to a significant reassessment of current assumptions about eighteenth-century literature and art.

Ronald Paulson

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