This volume explores some of the more important of Hans-Georg Gadamer's extensive writings on art and literature. The principal text included is 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', Gadamer's most sustained treatment of philosophical aesthetics. The eleven other essays focus particularly on the challenge issued by modern painting and literature to our customary ideas of art, and in turn revitalize our understanding of it. Gadamer demonstrates the continuing importance of such concepts as imitation, truth, symbol, and play for our appreciation of contemporary art, and thereby establishes its continuity with the Western tradition. The essays here are not technical and are readily accessible to the beginning student and the general reader. The collection as a whole serves to illustrate the practice of hermeneutics and to introduce Gadamer's thought. Robert Bernasconi provides an introduction clarifying the central aims of the essays and their relations to Gadamer's major work, Truth and Method, and to the philosophy of art since Kant. A bibliography of Gadamer's writings available in English is also included.

Foreword 
Editor+s introduction 
Sources 
The Relevance of the Beautiful 
Essays 
The festive character of theater 
Composition and interpretation 
Image and gesture 
The speechless image 
Art and imitation 
On the contribution of poetry to the search for truth 
Poetry and mimesis 
The play of art 
Philosophy and poetry 
Aesthetic and religious experience 
Appendix: intuition and vividness 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index