Aesthetics - Further Reading

Go to articleFurther Reading from Encarta

Further Reading offers additional information about your topics.

Aesthetics

Also on Encarta

•	Featured columns

•	Encarta's best lists

•

Test your knowledge

Aesthetics

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception. California University Press, 1974. Principal work from the Gestalt viewpoint.

Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present. Macmillan, 1966. Treats the main figures and concepts of Western aesthetics.

Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Argues that philosophers from Plato down have sought to explain or conceptualize art and have thereby obscured its nature and significance.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Penetrating Marxist-indebted view.

Gilbert, Katherine Everett, and Kuhn, Helmut. A History of Esthetics. New York: Greenwood, 1972. Standard work.

Gilson, Etienne. The Arts and the Beautiful. New York: Scribner, Studies art as creating beauty for beauty's sake.

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Sharp-minded, iconoclastic study in the still-current “analytical” mode.

Haskell, Francis. Past and Present in Art and Taste. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1987. Selected essays by an art historian.

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner, 1952. A theory of art presented as involved in and symbolic of feeling. Classic work.

Maquet, Jacques. The Aesthetic Experience. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1986. “An anthropologist looks at the visual arts” (title page).

Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty. New York: Dover; London: Constable, 1896. Analysis of materials of beauty, form, and expression in hedonistic terms. A classic work.

Shusterman, Richard, ed. Analytic Aesthetics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. A useful, well-edited collection of essays by British, American, and European philosophers.

Wind, Edgar. Art and anarchy. London: Duckworth, Classic study by art scholar.

Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Wide-ranging, informative, and undogmatic.