Aesthetics and Humean Aesthetic Norms in the Novels of Jane Austen

by Eva M. Dadlez

Introduction

The eighteenth century, Paul Oskar Kristeller tells us, in addition to crystallizing what we now call the fine arts, is also marked by an increased lay interest both in the arts and in criticism. Amateurs as well as philosophers ventured critical commentary on the arts. Talk concerning taste or beauty or the sublime was so much a part of general discourse that even novelists of that era incorporated such subjects in their work. Henry Fielding "was able to construct a novel on the true and false sublime in art," according to Samuel Monk, "and to draw an analogy between the sublime in art and the sublime in character." So we shouldn't find it surprising that perspectives on aesthetics are sometimes presented in the novels of Jane Austen. This subject matter ranges from descriptions of skill in the execution and sensitivity in the appreciation of particular arts to general observations about beauty and taste and what is requisite for the apprehension of the former and the possession of the latter.