Track My Order
Help Centre
1300 187 187
Likes
My Wish ListsLogin / Join
Booktopia
Australia's local bookstore
Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage : An Enlightenment Problematic - Tony C. Brown

Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage

An Enlightenment Problematic

By: Tony C. Brown

Paperback | 1 December 2012

At a Glance

Paperback

$79.68

or 4 interest-free payments of $19.92 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 7 to 10 business days

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 considers-including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe-turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.

In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one's ability to understand the human's relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence-what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security-traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human's place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to "exotic" examples from the New World-such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice-making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.

Industry 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

You Can Find This Book In

Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureGeneral Literary StudiesPhilosophyPhilosophy & AestheticsHistory of Western PhilosophyWestern Philosophy from 1600 to 1900Western Philosophy & EnlightenmentArts & EntertainmentHistory of Art & Design StylesArt Styles Not Defined by Date
Colonial ArtHistoryRegional & National HistoryEuropean HistoryBritish & Irish History

More in General Literary Studies

On Writing : A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King

On Writing

A Memoir of the Craft

Paperback

RRP $22.99

$21.90

Discourses and Selected Writings : Penguin Classics - Epictetus

Discourses and Selected Writings

Penguin Classics

Paperback

RRP $22.99

$21.90

If Not, Winter : Fragments Of Sappho - Anne Carson

If Not, Winter

Fragments Of Sappho

Paperback

RRP $29.99

$23.25

22%
OFF
A Sicilian Romance : Oxford World's Classics - Ann Radcliffe

A Sicilian Romance

Oxford World's Classics

Paperback

RRP $24.95

$18.25

27%
OFF
Cicero : Pro Marco Caelio - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero

Pro Marco Caelio

Paperback

RRP $47.95

$41.35

14%
OFF
The Voynich Manuscript - Raymond Clemens

The Voynich Manuscript

Hardcover

RRP $82.95

$55.00

34%
OFF

This product is categorised by