Practical Form

“A striking, rigorous, and—quite frankly—beautiful prehistory of form.”—Kelly Swartz, Genre

Shortlisted for the Oscar Kenshur Book Prize, sponsored by the Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Finalist for the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, sponsored by the Media Ecology Association

“Original and important, and of very complete scholarship, this book covers many discussions of eighteenth-century aesthetics with a highly unusual stress on craft and practice as they relate to aesthetics.”—John Bender, Stanford University

“In this brilliant study of Hogarth and Kant, Zitin shows that they developed a notion of form as the expression of the perceptual activity of abstraction on the part of both artist and spectator that is applicable to literary as well as visual art.”—Paul Guyer, author of A History of Modern Aesthetics

“This dazzling history of aesthetic theory pursues the consequences of Hogarth’s practical formalism for literary study with spellbinding patience and impeccable logic in beautiful prose.”—Marcie Frank, author of The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen

“Zitin offers an ambitious and persuasive account of what she calls ‘practical formalism.’ Equally insightful about a range of eighteenth-century accounts of beauty and contemporary theoretical debates, Zitin’s is a stunningly accomplished book.”—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago