ABSTRACT
The history of analytic philosophy of literature could be written as a narrative of the efforts to formulate and solve a series of interrelated paradoxes. Indeed, such efforts have been so central to the development of the discipline that the editors of a recent anthology of philosophy of literature single out attention to puzzles and paradoxes as definitive of the discipline. Nowhere has the tendency of analytic philosophers to pay too little attention to art been better identified than in Mary Mothersill's Beauty Restored. Mothersill does not share that tendency; she aims at nothing less than an analytic theory of art that can stand comparison with great theories of the pre-analytic past such as those of Immanuel Kant and John Dewey. Modernist philosophy has nothing on modernist literature when it comes to an acute awareness of the shortcomings of ordinary forms of expression.
