Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie, and Beyond: Imaginative Groundplots, and the Dialectic of an Emergent Aesthetics.

Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy (1595), an early contribution to English poetics, while not a direct "influence," adumbrates enlightenment, romantic, modern, and even postmodern theories of the sublime. There is a utopian aspect to Sidney's aesthetic. It is related to early modern empiricism and science, and it involves dialectical reason comparable to the dialectics of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Hegel's logic. Sidney anticipates Kant's concept of the aesthetic as the means of a human subject's self-recognition of the free play of its faculties, and of its agency and potency. While grounded in Renaissance and Neoclassical traditions, Sidney's aesthetic is original, generative, and linked by association, though not necessarily advocacy, with early modern feminist intellectual movements such as those highlighted in this volume. The aesthetic, moral, political, and ideological aspects of this extraordinary moment in early modern cultural history were facets of epistemically radical, innovative cultural and social adaptation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]