The Pleasures of the Imagination
English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4222913 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James A Winn (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 611 |
| Publication date | 1998-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | The pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century, John Brewer, 1997 |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2674447 |
| OpenAlex | W2062096900 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English high in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before
Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Sociology · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Scottish History and National Identity
Bibliomania
Making Hogarth Heritage
Eveline G. Brouwers Public Pantheons in Revolutionary Europe
Practices of Unmasking
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780
Women, Gender and Enlightenment
The Rhetoric of Sensibility
Continental imports to Britain, 1695–1740
The Stationers’ Company and the almanack trade
The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature
Proslavery in Print
Proslavery Arts and Culture
British Enlightenment Theatre
Dryden and the poetic career
Scientific and medical books, 1780–1830
More is different
The technologies of printing
Mining the archive
The Longmans and the book trade, c .1730–1830
The Bluestocking Legacy in the Romantic Era
Scholarly editing
The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics
Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood
The Picturesque Oratorio
Reading All About It
A New History from Below
Making Space for Geographies of Modernity
‘Plainly of Considerable Moment in Human Society’
Unsettling Gender, Sexuality, and Race
Tales of Two Cities
China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770
The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection
Festival Cities
Visible Bodies
The Politics of Handel's Early London Operas, 1711-1718
The Fashioning of Fashionable Diseases in the Eighteenth Century
Scientific publishing and the reading of science in nineteenth-century Britain
The Impact of the Military Profession on Highland Gentry Families, c. 1730 – 1830
Politics, Patriotism, and Gender
Coffee-House Politicians
All Together and All Distinct”
How I Had Liked This Villain! How I Had Admired Him!”
Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners
Transforming Metropolitan London, 1750–1960
Designs on the City
Love, Honor, and Obedience
Vauxhall Revisited
In the Theater of Counterrevolution
Continental Connections
The Religious and Social Significance of Methodist Tickets, and Associated Practices of Collecting and Recollecting, 1741–2017
Building Liberal Identities in 19th Century Madrid
Historical Research on the Self and Emotions
Mother–child relations and the discourse of maternity
[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets’
The Eighteenth‐Century Print
Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press
Swollen detail, or what a vessel might give
Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse
A World of Goods? The ‘Consumption Turn’ and Eighteenth-Century British History
Representing Aged Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England
A nation first in all the arts of civilisation’
The punitive consequences of consumer culture
The Curious MR Spectator
Looking back, groping forward
The politics and poetics of modern British Leisure
The Art and Science of Walking
Eccentric or enlightened? Unusual burial and commemoration in England, 1689 – 1823
Learning to Listen
Reading menageries
Whose heroes? The House of Commons, its commemorative sculptures and the illusion of British patriotism, 1795-1814
Rethinking elocution
The synthesis of town and trade
From populist to political dialogue in the public sphere
We Are Absolutely Coining Money”
Belinda , Emma , and the “Likeness” of the Portrait
Fashioning Adultery
The relations between geography and history
The social nature of map making in the Scottish enlightenment c .1682‐ c .1832
Geographies of exploration and improvement
Intellectual property and the role of manufacturers
Geographia's pen
Confining the Vernacular
Enlightenment? What Enlightenment? Reflections on Half a Million Books (British, French, and Dutch Private Libraries, 1665–1830)
Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment
Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward
The Cherokee embassy to London, 1762
Noting the Mind
How Navigators Think
Imperial Subjects on Trial
The cult of King Alfred the Great
La construcción de una nueva identidad liberal en el Madrid del XIX
Historia del consumo e historia del crecimiento. El consumo de tejidos en España, 1700–1850
Looking and Being Looked At
Harlequin Britain
Foreshadowing Tourism
A trio of talented women
Squares of distinction, webs of interest
Micro/macro
Rewritten and Reused
Provincial Networks, Dissenting Connections, and Noble Friends
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |