Beside history: Rethinking the primitive in aesthetics and literature, 1700--1830

Why does Immanuel Kant reference Maori facial tattooing to illustrate the crucial difference between free and merely adherent beauty in his Critique of Judgment? Or why does Kant's favorite poet, Alexander Pope, use exotic figures to index the solemn embrace of trivial things in modern life? These and like gestures turn up with remarkable frequency in European writings of the long eighteenth century. Such commonality elicits larger questions: Why do writers---literary, philosophical, historical---find people and objects from far-off lands so attractive, using them widely to address important issues of the day? If savage peoples prove central in answering a question or illustrating a problem, how necessary are they to the question's or problem's formulation? Pursuing these questions through readings of literary and philosophical works, I reveal an important series of linkages between the savage, the primitive, and the aesthetic. Doing so, I reframe the history of eighteenth-century aesthetics, bringing out its relation to the primitive and the savage; and I redress the tendency to view the Enlightenment as an internal European development, underscoring the impact of the New Worlds of America and the South Seas upon European thought and literature in the long eighteenth century. What emerges in my account is a picture of the long eighteenth century not as a period in which a self-contained Europe simply cast its gaze wider in the world, but as a time when the distant places of the earth reached deep into so-called European thought and expression, to challenge and to shape it in myriad ways.