 The historical backdrop against which Beardsley developed his philosophy of art in the late 1940s and early 1950s includes the three elements mentioned at the beginning of the preceding paragraph. There were developments in the arts—new forms in music, painting, and literature had appeared and were appearing—but there was also a well-established and relatively large canon of works almost universally regarded as aesthetically superior and worthy of attention. Art criticism had become an industry, with major schools of all sorts flourishing: Marxist, Formalist, psychoanalytic, semiotic, historical, biographical. And philosophy had changed in rapid and unexpected ways. Analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on language and strong empiricist tendencies, had gained ascendancy in American universities in little more than 20 years, and dominated the philosophical scene.