A History of Literary Aesthetics in America

xii, 388 pp. "The author approaches literary aesthetics from the point of view that the quest itself is a thing of beauty. And to comprehend the fluctuations in that quest through two centuries, he has combed the works of writers who have dealt explicitly with the problem of aesthetic definition (George Santayana and John Dewey are accorded separate chapters) and those in whose writings a thought-out point of view is implicit (including such major imaginative writers as Melville and Frost). ...Among the aesthetic questions he examines are: the relationshp of sensibility to knowledge; the nature of poetic creativity; the roles of symbolism and metaphor; the differentia of poetry and prose; the tension between poetry and science; feeling and reason as forms of cognition; the literary applications of metaphysics and science; the nature of sentimentality."