The pleasures of the imagination
Subtitle: English culture in the eighteenth century
By: John Brewer.
Edition: 1st Farrar Straus and Giroux ed.
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 721
Subjects: England -- Civilization -- 18th century; England -- Social life and customs -- 18th century; England -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
Description: John Brewer's landmark book shows us how English artists, amateurs, entrepreneurs, and audiences developed a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance.

Brewer's purpose is to show how literature, painting, music, and the theater related to a public increasingly avid for them; how artists used, or were used by, publishers, plagiarists, impresarios, and managers; and how contemporary ideas of taste combined with patriotic fervor and shrewdly managed commerce to create a vibrant, dynamic national culture.

In Brewer's transforming analysis, we see revealed a picture of English eighteenth-century art and literature that is less familiar but more surprising, more various, and more convincing than any we have seen before.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 667-691) and index.
Originally published: United Kingdom : HarperCollins, 1997.