Criticism and Modernity Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and Its Academies

This book argues that from the late seventeenth century to the present national cultures have sought to regulate the democratic subject through the academic form of arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. It offers a radical reconsideration of the history of modernity, tracing the emergence of criticism as a socio-cultural practice across all the major European nations, and drawing on an extensive range of European literature and philosophy.

Thomas Docherty is Professor of English, Director of Research, and Director of the Kent Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Kent.