Writings about art and creativity can be traced to the texts of classical antiquity, but aesthetics as a separate and systematic area of philosophy is almost wholly a product of the eighteenth century. It was at that time that philosophers began to treat notions about creativity and our responses to it with the kind of philosophical rigour found in epistemology and metaphysics. Eighteenth-century authors sought to define what poetry, literature, painting and sculpture were and to determine the links between the various forms of artistic expression. They questioned whether artistic sensitivity could be acquired or was innate, and asked how good taste was cultivated and maintained. This collection gathers together many of the authors and works that tackled these questions in the eighteenth century. Foregoing the most well-known and easily accessible aesthetics texts, this set presents some of the rarest, less well-known but equally important works - books that made a substantial contribution when first published but which have since been neglected. The authors include important eighteenth-century figures such as Daniel Webb, John Gilbert Cooper, and William Jackson. Readers familiar with the works of famous aestheticians such as Hume, Shaftesbury, Burke, and Home will find much to interest them in these writings and will gain valuable background information on the aesthetics debate. --collects the less well-known 18th-century aesthetics texts --includes very scarce titles, rarely found even in major libraries --features neglected authors and titles that should be read alongside the better-known, already available, works --extensive new general introduction plus notes on each author and text by John Valdimir Price, highly respected authority on eighteenth-century philosophy and co- editor of The Dictionary of 18th-Century British Philosophers (forthcoming, 1999)

The art of the early republic abounds in representations of deception: the villains of Gothic novels deceive their victims with visual and acoustic tricks; the ordinary citizens of picaresque novels are hoodwinked by quacks and illiterate but shrewd adventurers; and innocent sentimental heroines fall for their seducers' eloquently voiced half-truths and lies. Yet, as Philipp Schweighauser points out in Beautiful Deceptions, deception happens not only within these novels but also through them. The fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, and Royall Tyler invent worlds that do not exist. Similarly, Charles Willson Peale's and Raphaelle Peale's trompe l'oeil paintings trick spectators into mistaking them for the real thing, and Patience Wright's wax sculptures deceive (and disturb) viewers. Beautiful Deceptions examines how these and other artists of the era at times acknowledge art's dues to other social realms—religion, morality, politics—but at other times insist on artists' right to deceive their audiences, thus gesturing toward a more modern, autonomous notion of art that was only beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century. Building on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics as "the science of sensuous cognition" and the writings of early European aestheticians including Kant, Schiller, Hume, and Burke, Schweighauser supplements the dominant political readings of deception in early American studies with an aesthetic perspective. Schweighauser argues that deception in and through early American art constitutes a comment on eighteenth-century debates concerning the nature and function of art as much as it responds to shifts in social and political organization.

First published 1999, Howard Irving details Croch’s lecturing career and examines the influences of figures such a Charles Burney and Sir Joshua Reynolds on his approach to the ancient-modern debate. Irving also makes available for the first time in a modern edition Crotch’s 1818 lecture series. These texts help to fill a gap in our knowledge of the development of musical classics, as they span a period of years that were crucial to the history of canon formation.

Elfenbein takes on the absorbing subject of homosexuality in British Romantic writing, showing the centrality of disreputable desires to the works of Romantic male authors--from William Beckford to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Blake--as well as to the writings of lesser-known but equally significant female authors of the period.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times