Perhaps the central problem for contemporary critics who address aesthetics is defining exactly what we mean by the term. In addition to the abundance of historically specific ideas about aesthetics, various topics can be crowded under its aegis: aesthetic objects, aesthetic judgments (or values), aesthetic theories, aesthetic experience, aesthetic attitude (or function), aesthetic practice. In the past two decades, American literary criticism has tended to dismiss aesthetics in toto by identifying it almost exclusively with New Criticism’s formal judgments about specific aesthetic objects. This dismissal has consisted of debunking New Criticism’s idea of a transhistoric aesthetic object by revealing the sociopolitical interestedness of aesthetic judgments supposedly based on objective formal properties. Yet as Winfried Fluck has argued,‘‘[T] he new revisionism has systematically misunderstood and misrepresented the issue of aesthetics, because it has conflated the New Critical version of aesthetic value with the issue of aesthetics in general....[in part]... to justify their own project of an historical and political criticism.’’Such a conflation of aesthetics with a formal focus on ‘‘an inherent quality, structure, or gestalt,’’Fluck contends,‘‘is by no means plausible’’and, in fact, is ‘‘ahistorical.’’1 Instead of continuing to dismiss aesthetics or retreating into the defense of a transcendent canon, American literary criticism needs to explore how historically specific ideas about aesthetics and the aesthetic practices they engendered gave rise to something we might call aesthetic experience. The earliest uses of the term aesthetic in nineteenth-century American criticism reveal the anachronism of identifying aesthetics with