Anna Barbauld as a Philosopher of Art

Abstract Anna Barbauld’s prose and poetic work spanned the period from the late Enlightenment into Romanticism, and this chapter adds to the contemporary recovery of Barbauld by rediscovering her as a philosopher of art. After a sketch of her life and work, the chapter looks at her early essays on the problem of why we enjoy the sufferings of fictional characters. Next, the chapter looks at Barbauld’s important essay on the devotional taste, in which she argues that all exercise of the imagination is religious, and reciprocally that religion has aesthetic feeling and imagination as two of its central components. Devotion also unites the beautiful and the sublime. Through her writing for children, Barbauld’s applied devotional aesthetic hugely influenced nineteenth-century culture. Finally, the chapter turns to her edition of The British Novelists, discussing her argument for the legitimacy of the novel as an art-form and her idea of canons as temporary, partial, and provisional constructions.