“The Critic’s Notebook,” by the Editors

“The Critic’s Notebook,” by the Editors

Nonfiction: Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, by Hugo Shakeshaft (Princeton University Press): In the modern academy it falls to philosophy to teach us about beauty, in bloodless prose, while most art and literary historians scrupulously avoid aesthetic judgments. The irony, as Hugo Shakeshaft observes in the introduction to Beauty and the Gods, can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when such theorists as Baumgarten, Ka…