An Aesthetics and Ecology of Presence

Abstract

This essay examines models of direct perception in the literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth century. These models run counter to the dominant theory of perception during the period, which emphasizes the internal representation of distant objects. I focus on works of poetry, philosophy, and fiction that put their reader up close to a world at hand and explore a physical surround from the perspective of a moving body. My examples draw from the loco-descriptive poetry of Dyer and Thomson, the aesthetics of Kames and Hogarth, the anti-representational epistemology of Thomas Reid, and the letters and fiction of Laurence Sterne.

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