Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry
10 best books like Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing): A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, On Painting, Anatomy of Criticism, The Philosophy of Literary Form, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
| Author | Edmund Burke |
| ISBN | 0192835807 |
An eloquent and sometimes even erotic book, the Philosophical Enquiry was long dismissed as a piece of mere juvenilia. However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also...
| Author | Émile Mâle |
| ISBN | 0064300323 |
Emile Male's book aids understanding of medieval art and medieval symbolism, and of the vision of the world which presided over the building of the French cathedrals. It looks at French religious art in the Middle Ages, its forms, and especially the Eastern sources of sculptural iconography used in...
'To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The Renaissance (1873) at once became the touchstone for the decadent imagination for a generation of Oxford undergraduates. Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would...
| Author | Leon Battista Alberti |
| ISBN | 0140433317 |
Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435). Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion;...
| Author | Northrop Frye |
| ISBN | 0691069999 |
Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. Employing examples of world literature from ancient times to...
| Author | Kenneth Burke |
| ISBN | 0520024834 |
From the ForewordThese pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows." Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action--and...
| Author | Arthur O. Lovejoy |
| ISBN | 0674361539 |
From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world. In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy...
| Author | M.L. West |
| ISBN | 0199280754 |
The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries,...
| Author | Margot Wittkower |
| ISBN | 1590172132 |
A rare art history classic that The New York Times calls a "delightful, scholarly and gossipy romp through the character and conduct of artists from antiquity to the French Revolution."
Born Under Saturn is a classic work of scholarship written with a light and winning touch. Margot and Rudolf...
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
| Author | Paul De Man |
| ISBN | 0300028458 |
This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the...
| Author | Victor Shklovsky |
| ISBN | 0916583643 |
Viktor Shklovsky's 1925 book Theory of Prose might have become the most important work of literary criticism in the twentieth century had not two obstacles barred its way: the crackdown by Soviet dictatorship on Shklovsky and other Russian Formalists in the 1930s, and the unavailability of an English...
Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism
| Author | Matei Călinescu |
| ISBN | 0822307677 |
Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and...
| Author | Alain Robbe-Grillet |
| ISBN | 0810108216 |
Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leaders of the new French literary movement of the sixties, has long been regarded as the outstanding writer of the nouveau roman, as well as its major spokesman. For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense...
| Author | Bernard Knox |
| ISBN | 0393034267 |
Preface
Introduction
Greece
Homer
Hesiod
The archaic lyric & iambus
Archilochus (7th century B.C.)
Tyrtaeus (7th century B.C.)
Alcman (late 7th century B.C.)
Hipponax (middle 6th century B.C.)
Alcaeus (late 7th century-middle 6th century B.C.)...
| Author | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel |
Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.
For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), art almost ranked with religion and philosophy in its power to reveal the fundamental nature of existence. But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller...
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
| Author | John Updike |
| ISBN | 0140175199 |
Since 1960 the novelist and poet has been reviewing books for the New Yorker, and the reviews of the last eight years make up the bulk of this volume. Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K....
| Author | Carl Lotus Becker |
| ISBN | 0300101503 |
Based on the Storrs lectures delivered at Yale University
A distinguished American historian challenges the belief that 18th century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl L. Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very...
| Author | Arnold Hauser |
| ISBN | 0394701151 |
First published in 1951, Arnold Hauser's commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art, from its origins in the Stone Age through to the "Film Age." This new edition of a classic work explores historical and social movements and the effects these have had on the production...
| Author | Friedrich Schiller |
| ISBN | 0486437396 |
“Essential reading.” — New Society.
A classic of eighteenth-century thought, Friedrich Schiller’s treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy’s most profound works. In addition to its importance to the history of ideas, this 1795 essay remains relevant...
| Author | Charles Baudelaire |
| ISBN | 0140446060 |
Before publishing the sensuous and scandalous poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) had already earned respect as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. This stimulating selection of criticism reveals him as a worshipper at the altar of beauty, illuminating his belief...
| Author | René Wellek |
| ISBN | 0156890844 |
«باید یقین داشته باشیم که لذت ادبیات لذتی نیست که از میان لذتهای ممکن دیگر برگزیده شده باشد، بلکه لذتی است «والاتر». زیرا محصول کوشش والاتری است که همان...
| Author | Walter Benjamin |
| ISBN | 1859844138 |
Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as amongst the greatest literary critics of this century, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama is his most sustained and original work. Indeed, Georg Lukacs—one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin’s aesthetics—singled out this work as one of...
| Author | Erwin Panofsky |
| ISBN | 0226645517 |
Since its original publication, Erwin Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts has been standard reading for students of art history. It is both an introduction to the study of art and, for those with more specialized interests, a profound discussion of art and life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance....
