The Poetics of Josiah Royce : Toward a Roycean Aesthetics

Recovers and dissects a large corpus of writings on literature by the American philosopher, Josiah Royce, that have languished, undeservedly so, in obscurity for over a century. Josiah Royce is not known for his contributions to literary theory and criticism particularly or aesthetics more generally. He has left us a mass of material, much of it juvenilia published in obscure nineteenth-century periodicals, relating to these topics as well as many references to them in his major books. They have received scant attention from Royce scholars, with but few exceptions, who have remarked on them cursorily. His literary studies are not peripheral but integral to his philosophy, which they exemplify. The Poetics of Josiah Royce intends to bring Royce's writings on literature to the attention of Royce scholars and general readers who might be interested in American philosophy and literature by demonstrating how they adumbrate central themes of his mature philosophy such as his communitarianism, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion and extrapolating a more general philosophy of art or aesthetics from his theory of literature, which can brook comparison with the more familiar aesthetics of John Dewey and George Santayana in the American tradition.