San Antonio College Library

Discusses the place of emotion in our response to works of art, the objectivity of critical judgements, and the relations between literature and morality.

In The Viewer as Poet, Norman Land provides the first comprehensive survey of ekphrasis in literature and art criticism from antiquity through the Renaissance. Land demonstrates more fully than anyone has so far, that Renaissance art criticism assimilated the poetic tradition of ekphrasis while maintaining its function of analyzing works of art. Broadly speaking, the book shows that purely literary descriptions of art in poetry and prose contain a...

Photography and Its Critics offers an original overview of nineteenth-century American and European writing about photography from such disparate fields as art theory, social reform, and physiology. The earliest criticism of the invention was informed by an ample legacy of notions about objectivity, appearances, and copying. Received ideas about neutral vision, intuitive genius, and progress in art also shaped nineteenth-century understanding of photography....

What Gardens Mean offers a distinctive blend of historical and contemporary material, ranging from extensive accounts of famous eighteenth-century gardens to incisive connections with present-day philosophical debates. And while Ross examines aesthetic writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Joseph Addison's Spectator essays on the pleasures of imagination, the book's opening chapter surveys more recent theories about the...

The Return of the Real presents an original reading of art and theory over the last three decades, with special emphasis to the controversial connections between the two. It also rethinks the relation between historical avant gardes and neo-avant-gardes. The result is an authoritative genealogy of art and theory from minimalism and pop to the present, with important ramifications for prewar studies as well. Against the cliche that contemporary art...

This book tells the story of Germany's rich, flourishing, and diversified world of art in the last decades of the nineteenth century--a world that has until recently been eclipsed by the events of the twentieth century. Basing her narrative on a close reading of contemporary periodicals, and lavishly complementing it with cartoons and other illustrations from these publications, Beth Irwin Lewis provides the first systematic, comprehensive study of...