I LIMITI DEL SOGGETTIVISMO ESTETICO. SUI PRINCIPÎ DEL GUSTO DI ARCHIBALD ALISON

Abstract

Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) remained long neglected after their first release. They were rediscovered only twenty years later, thanks to a review by Francis Jeffrey published on the «Edinburgh Review» in 1811, which suddenly improved their fame and circulation. This paper aims at pointing out retrospectively the reasons for that prolonged indifference, considering if and how much Alison’s aesthetic theory and his emotivistic reductionism could sound interesting and acceptable for an eighteenth-century English reader.