In The sense of Early Modern writing, Mark Robson pursues the relation between the concept of the 'early modern' and modernity, tracing the complex interactions of post-Romantic, philosophical aesthetics and early modern rhetoric and poetics. The book therefore questions the status of what we now think of as literary texts in a period prior to the emergence of literature as a category. In this way, Robson argues for an attention to the classical notion of aisthesis, that is, for the crucial dimension of perception and response in reading and thinking -- and its rhetorical determination -- to...

In many thriving areas of critical activity, critics have come to view with suspicion such notions as literary specificity or literary autonomy, and perhaps even literature. Critics in fields such as postcolonial studies, queer theory and feminist theory have re-examined--and attacked--the groundings of a traditional literary canon, and have raised questions about the basis and benefits of literary study. These intellectual shifts have taken place in a political and institutional context where those studying and teaching literature have repeatedly come under pressure to justify their...