Theories of Ugliness: An Unseemly Aesthetic History

Why has our preoccupation with concepts, standards, and theories of the beautiful not resulted in a correspondingly comprehensive theoretical treatment of the ugly? Theories of Ugliness remedies this by gathering and scrutinising ideas of the ugly and unsightly from across the history of Western aesthetic and philosophical writing.

Taking in ancient, medieval and early modern concepts, all the way through to more recent Anglo-American conceptions, this book reveals the extraordinary preoccup...