The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion, of the Arts (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion, of the Arts The title I have taken for this book expresses my sense of what needs doing rather than what I my self would claim to have done. I have suffered, both in selecting a title and in treating my subject itself, from a certain poverty in our English critical vo cabulary. The word genre seems to be gaining some currency in English. The same can scarcely be said of the nee'lange des genres and yet it is around the me'lange a'es genres and allied topics that my main argument revolves. Napoleon is reported to have said to Goethe in the course of a conversation on a problem very similar to the one I have attempted, Je m'étonne qu'un aussi grand esprit que vous n'aime pas les genres tranche's. I have often been forced to borrow Napoleon's term and speak of the genre trancne', for lack of a suitable English equiva lent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.