A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Power

This book offers a theory of those formal properties of art that are apt to afford strong aesthetic experience - a project resembling Aristotle's in the Poetics, where he analysed structures in tragedies that condition the "peculiar pleasure" of tragedy. However, the book's scope cuts across all genres of literature and also includes classical music - the formal art par excellence. Drawing on a wide array of recent theoretical work and empirical evidence, the book closely analyses dozens of ...