| This dissertation argues for the reincorporation of William Hogarth into the history of aesthetics, a field of inquiry with eighteenth-century origins. Hogarth is, of course, an established figure in the history of British art. Precisely because of his fame as a graphic satirist, though, Hogarth's 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty doesn't feature as prominently as it should when scholars recount the rise of a philosophical theory of taste from the British moralists of the early eighteenth century to Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1792. Hogarth defines beauty as formal property, so his Analysis serves as a primer on how to discern form in nature and art, namely, by means of abstraction (the mental exercise of resolving objects into lines and spatial relationships). For Hogarth, however, abstraction remains grounded in materiality insofar as the activities of manufacture help determine the manifestations of form. Premised on the mutual determination of form and practice, Hogarth's aesthetic theory gives pride of place to technique, which is to say, the modes of perceptual discipline that enable the translation of material object into mental image and, with varying degrees of license, back again.;In "Practical Formalism," I describe how abstraction reconceived as a perceptual technique makes for a revised understanding of aesthetic pleasure, in which the activity of thinking about form is itself the pleasure to which beauty gives rise. I also show how Hogarth's commitment to technique as a kind of thinking supports the democratizing impulse for which he has long been cited. Only when we appreciate the rigor of his formalism, I argue, can we recognize how his politics of inclusion extends along gender as well as class lines. Finally, I show how Hogarth's contribution to the theory of aesthetics bears on the work of his successors, specifically Edmund Burke, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant. |
