Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewTextual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Timothy Erwin. Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+279.Joshua J. WeinerJoshua J. WeinerUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe eighteenth century, we have been taught, saw the rise of modern aesthetics. Inspired by empiricism, this discourse privileged subjective experience over canons of harmony and proportion grounded in classical rhetoric, valued the self-improvement of the spectator’s taste over conformity to a beau idéal, and was drawn to the sublime power of metaphor and color against the formal order of the line and descriptive imagery. Timothy Erwin’s Textual Vision asks us to reconsider the relationship between the new aesthetics and the rhetorical tradition of “design” preceding it. What occurred was not a succession of Kuhnian paradigms, one supplanting the other, but the superimposition of two aesthetic discourses in a complex dialectical relationship. Central to design was ut pictura poesis, the notion that texts should provide a protocol for cognitive engagement through visualization, or “textual vision.” In a series of readings focused on the image-text relation from Pope to Austen, Textual Vision provides the best account we have of the aesthetics of design during a period we had been given to believe was in the process of repudiating it as an anachronism.Chapter 1 introduces Pope as the great partisan of design, outlining the disegno tradition from the school of Annibale Carracci to the appearance of the “Whig view of aesthetics” (3) with Addison. Erwin carefully reads passages in Pope that signal his commitment to design, its ideal of beauty, and its “aesthetic[s] of formal fascination” (118). He shows the breadth of this tradition, its emphases on profuse ornamental complexity, on the intimation of “secret Relation[s]” (42), and on the centrality of the figure of Venus (48). Unlike readings that point to Pope’s interest in the sublime or in the precarious materiality of the body, Erwin breathes new life into Pope the formalist. He concludes that Pope’s aesthetic ideals were not flights from history but investments in “an alternative social vision” associated with “urbane cosmopolitanism” (58), a value usually associated with Whig aesthetic values. In effect, Pope was adapting design into the world of the new aesthetics.In chapter 2, Erwin explains how Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage functioned as a proxy attack on Pope, advancing its own model of sympathy aligned with the new empiricist aesthetics. For Johnson, Pope’s commitment to exemplary virtue—which Erwin argues is associated with “the classical image” (93)—caused him to vengefully abandon his informant and protégé Richard Savage, who is presented as a parable of tragically failed self-improvement. In order to make him exemplary, Erwin shows, Johnson must “wres[t] his subject from the visual field” (61). Yet the figure of Savage is saturated with references to textual vision: stubbornly susceptible to abortive “designs,” his great flaw was “a kind of blindness” (61). Erwin concludes that Johnson’s antidesign argument dialectically absorbs the value of textual vision, preserved in the figure of Savage, rather than rejecting it.The sprawling, climactic third chapter expands the argument for the persistence of design through the elevation of the new aesthetics into a national program, including discussions of Hogarth, Handel, Reynolds, Richardson, and Gibbon. Erwin claims that Hogarth’s “self-conscious empiricism” (127) attempted to reinvent and modernize key aspects of the design tradition by tuning it to everyday life. Thus, he does not reject design and its ideal of beauty, just “any concept of the beautiful that renders beauty invisible to the ordinary viewer” (112). This model, Erwin argues, was allied with “the iconoclasm of Samuel Richardson” (104) rather than Fielding’s self-consciously prodesign alternative. In one of the book’s most compelling readings, Erwin tracks the swarm of “designs” in Pamela and the visual illustrations the novel suggested, showing that Richardson’s seeming antivisuality was actually a commitment, by means of the modest withholding of the image the novel was actually centered around, to the old project of textual vision.In chapter 4, Jane Austen’s corpus contains both aesthetics models, developing the tentative synthesis anticipated in the discourse of the picturesque. Pride and Prejudice, with its pivotal scene in which Elizabeth has a revelatory encounter with Darcy’s portrait at Pemberley, is prodesign, while Persuasion, which invokes visual culture in a “gentle parody of the aesthetics of linear fascination” (179), is proempiricist. Erwin argues that these novels reflect the two sides of Austen’s integrated aesthetic model, already articulated in Northanger Abbey, which “refuses both the formal metaphor of design and the iconoclasm of the image” (183). She recuses the narration from all partisan aesthetic debates and then recapitulates “their basic formative elements” (187) as moments in fiction. This suggests a modern regime of textual vision based on a new “empirical visual culture” (198), which incorporates the seductive beauties of design rather than sets itself against them. In his introduction, Erwin finds evidence of this model as late as Nabokov, who presents the reader with a colorful, subjectively enticing metaphorical image against the background of inconspicuous descriptive phrases like “green trees,” “black asphalt,” and “blue signs” (3) that preserve the formal ideal of a well-ordered fictional design within the modernist text.In providing us with a subtle account of the persistence of design through the eighteenth century (and beyond), Erwin makes an important corrective to the familiar narrative about the rise of the new aesthetics, which takes us with ease from Addison to Kant, concerning how it related to the tradition preceding it. Textual Vision could also be productively read within the resurgence of interest in the beautiful, a category it refreshingly approaches as a textured historical discourse rather than an avenue for repoliticizing aesthetics. Its most frustrating aspect was a lack of big-picture orientation at either the chapter or book level. The reader was frequently plunged into a dense historical and conceptual discussion with little guidance about the overall intervention or how the individual moments were intended to fit together. The book drew on an impressive range of references but very seldom explained how it wished to position itself in relation to existing scholarship. It was fruitfully polemical to give an account of eighteenth-century aesthetics without figures like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume; one nevertheless wanted to hear how the turn toward design should motivate a reassessment of the general aesthetic discourse whose mainstream is left out of sight. Even though it missed opportunities to revise broader narratives about the role of aesthetics in what the subtitle cryptically calls “the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture,” the rediscovery of design in Textual Vision will remain indispensable. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686933HistoryPublished online August 31, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.