Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Prairie State Books)

About this book

In his Enquirywhich has been described as "certainly one of the most important aesthetic documents that eighteenth -century England produced"the young Burke provided a systematic analysis of the sublime and the beautiful together with a distinctive terminology which served to express certain facets of the changing sensibility of his time. The introduction traces the main sources of Burkes ideas and establishes the nature of his originality. The largest section of the editors introduction however examines the influence of the Enquiry. Major writers like Johnson Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy painters such as Fuseli and Mortimer and critics such as Diderot Lessing and Kant as well as many other minor figures recognized Burkes new insights and in varying degrees assimilated them. The second edition revised by Burke himself provides the copy-text including changes between the first and second editions.