Title: The pleasures of the imagination
Subtitle: English culture in the eighteenth 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.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Civilization, Intellectual life, New York Times reviewed, Great britain, civilization, Great britain, social life and customs, Great britain, intellectual life, Great britain, history, 18th century, Art, british, history, English literature, history and criticism, 18th century
Places: England
Time periods: 18th century