Traverses a thousand years of literature in English from Beowulf to Beckett to make the case for restoring aesthetic pleasure to literary studies.

In 18th-century debates, the sensus communis referred to a common sensibility that preceded, underwrote and challenged political bodies. In Kant's aesthetics, it is the pleasure grounding an individual's autonomous judgement that properly speaks for the sensus communis. This concurrence of community and individuality is essential, as James Phillips contends, to the democratic project that literature and literary studies can help advance.

English Literature and the Aesthetics of Community demonstrates how the writing and reading of literature deepens and complicates our understanding of other people. The more we come to recognize our incommensurability and take pleasure in it, the more robust will be our sense not only of democratic equality, but also of the untenability of social hierarchies and unifying mythologies. By examining the transpersonal dimensions of moods and affects such as horror, joy and boredom, Phillips argues for English literature's role in keeping open an experience of community, intersubjectivity and dialogue that neither liberalism nor nationalism knows how to account for.

Through a series of case studies on authors including Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Charlotte and Emily Brontë, this book aims to find in the canon, instead of some binding cultural covenant, an opportunity to see our differences in action, for to read the same book is to confront how we read in different ways.