The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
"[I]n the late seventeenth century high culture moved out of the narrow confines of the court and into diverse spaces in London....The city [became] not only the center of culture but one of its key subjects." Brewer (The Sinews of Power, Knopf, 1989) has written a nearly flawless study of a key period in English literary and artistic culture. A plethora of illustrations, both written and visual, support his thesis. The 18th-century British republic of letters was shaped by the deliberate efforts of its artists and writers to define aesthetic criteria and standards of good taste in their fields, wresting control from the collector/connoisseur, to whom "the artist was of far less consequence than the subject of his portraits." Brewer discusses a host of significant topics, such as the evolution of the book trade and the establishment of the Royal Academy of Art. An intellectual feast of the first order to be savored by amateur and professional alike; enthusiastically recommended.?David Keymer, California State Univ., StanislausCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.