The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic

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Tony C. Brown examines "the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing" in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considersincluding the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoeturn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.

Reviews

"Mounting a strong critique of historicism in recent literary studies for implying causal relations, Tony Brown attends instead to the conditions of possibility of history. In "The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage", Brown reevaluates the importance of the notion of the primitive in funding an ur-history that can only be conjectural. He points to the interest in the origins of language in making it possible to think in terms of the human capacity to develop and become historical. This is compelling work that suggests the important interconnections among aesthetics and anthropological thought." --Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins University

Author Bio

Tony C. Brown is associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and literary theory.