'For a work concerned to muddy critical waters, Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing.'Taylor & Francis Online'Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing. Augustine’s study is a salutary reminder of something too often overlooked: that poets and writers did not usually consider themselves ambassadors for the ideals of whatever literary period posterity has since consigned them to – and that the contingencies of history always blind writers in any given moment to the outcomes of a future that seems to us so self-evident.' The Seventeenth Century