This essay addresses the dilemma faced by literature teachers, whose discipline is based on a subject that itself is widely regarded as lacking any stable identity. The essay proposes that the terms "literature" and "art" can best be understood if we combine an essentialist approach to aesthetic experience with a historicizing approach to the relevant categories that exist in any specific historical context. Aesthetic experience itself is identified by means of a revised version of "aesthetic attitude" theory that emphasized the suspension of self-concern and the projection of the perceiver?s response into the aesthetic image. The relationship between aesthetic experience and historically situated aesthetic categories such as "literature" is seen as a strong but imperfect one, with inconsistencies that can be explained if they are addressed in terms of both aesthetic experience and the historical context. This double approach is explored in relation to a specific example--the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu.