Over the last 20 years, critics and historians of the late eighteenth-century have developed a multidisciplinary approach to the history of culture. This dialogue between literary critics and theorists, art historians and social historians is remapping the relations between culture and society, politics and aesthetics, law and representation. These essays by twelve internationally known scholars return"Taste" to a central position in the discussion of nation, culture and aesthetics in the period.

In this book, ten leading commentators explore the interfaces between art and aesthetics in dialogue with a philosophical text (Theodor Adorno's draft introduction to "Aesthetic Theory"), a piece of literary writing (Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy"), and a major contemporary painting (Gerhard Richter's "Betty," 1988).

Since the 1960s, the literary critic Harold Bloom has been producing some of the most powerful criticism in the United States. This large body of work has, since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, increasingly distanced itself from all critical vogues, be they psychoanalytic, post-structuralist or new formalist, in favour of a highly idiosyncratic poetic theory. First published in 1988, this title was the first to engage with this unique approach in order to extend and amplify its most crucial insights about the nature of rhetoric, as it functions both in poetry and in poetic theory. The underlying argument is for a historical conception of rhetoric, for an extension of Bloom's 'diachronic rhetoric' towards historical rhetorics.

Since the 1960s, the literary critic Harold Bloom has been producing some of the most powerful criticism in the United States. This large body of work has, since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, increasingly distanced itself from all critical vogues, be they psychoanalytic, post-structuralist or new formalist, in favour of a highly idiosyncratic poetic theory. First published in 1988, this title was the first to engage with this unique approach in order to extend and amplify its most crucial insights about the nature of rhetoric, as it functions both in poetry and in poetic theory. The underlying argument is for a historical conception of rhetoric, for an extension of Bloom's 'diachronic rhetoric' towards historical rhetoric.

What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? Would our 'great men (usually)' story of how ideas are formed and change over time begin to look very different? This book explores these questions through case studies on ideas such as 'liberty', 'republicanism' or 'government' using digital humanities approaches to large scale text data sets. It sets out the methodologies and tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab as exemplifications of how new digital methods can open up the history of ideas to heretofore unseen avenues of enquiry and evidence. By applying text mining techniques to intellectual history or the history of concepts, this book explains how computational approaches to text mining can substantially increase the power of our understanding of ideas in history.

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century.
The first chapter outlines an innovative account of concepts as cultural entities. The second develops an original methodology for recovering the historical formation of the concept of human rights based on data extracted from digital archives. This enables us to track the construction of conceptual architectures over time.
Having established the architecture of the concept of human rights, the book then examines two key moments in its historical formation: the First Continental Congress in 1775 and the publication of Tom Paine's Rights of Man in 1792. Arguing that we have yet to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of the eighteenth-century invention of the concept "rights of man," the final chapter addresses our problematic contemporary attempts to leverage human rights as the most efficacious way of achieving universal equality

The concept of the Sublime has influenced aesthetic and theoretical debate ever since it was first widely invoked in the eighteenth century. However, the unavailability of many crucial early texts has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's valuable anthology, which includes an introduction, and headnotes to each entry, now offers students and scholars ready access to a deep and complex tradition of writing on the Sublime, many of them never before reprinted in modern editions.

The Education of the Eye examines the origins of visual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture. The first was constructed on knowledge, on what one already knew, while the second was grounded in the eye itself. Though the first was most likely to lead to a socially and politically elite form for visual culture, the second, it was held, would almost certainly end up in the chaos of the mob. But there was another route through these conflicting accounts of the visual that preserved the education of the eye while at the same time allowing the eye freedom to enter into the realm of culture. This third route, that of the sentimental look, is explored in a series of contexts: the gallery, the pleasure garden, the landscape park, and the country house. The Education of the Eye sets out to reclaim visual culture for the democracy of the eye and to explain how aesthetic contemplation may, once more, be open to all who have eyes to look. The book will interest historians of eighteenth-century British culture and historians of architecture, art, and landscape, as well as readers generally curious about the origins of our current visual culture.

Over the last twenty years, critics and historians of the late Eighteenth-century have developed a multidisciplinary approach to the history of culture. This dialogue between literary critics and theorists, art historians and social historians is remapping the relations between culture and society, politics and aesthetics, law and representation. These essays by twelve internationally known scholars return 'Taste' to a central position in the discussion of nation, culture and aesthetics in the period.

In this volume of essays, scholars of the interdisciplinary field of law and literature write about the role of emotion in English law and legal theory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The law's claims to reason provided a growing citizenry that was beginning to establish its rights with an assurance of fairness and equity. Yet, an investigation of the rational discourse of the law reveals at its core the processes of emotion, and a study of literature that engages with the law exposes the potency of emotion in the practice and understanding of the law. Examining both legal and literary texts, the authors in this collection consider the emotion that infuses the law and find that feeling, sentiment and passion are integral to juridical thought as well as to specific legislation.