Promotional Information

A significant reassessment of current assumptions about eighteenth-century literature and art.

About the Author

Ronald Paulson is Mayer Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins. His previous books include Representations of Revolution, Hogarth, in three volumes, and The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy, the last available from Johns Hopkins.

Reviews

Paulson shows that Cervantes set the dominant model of comic writing in the period, and he explores the different ways in which writers lay claim to his work. In the early eighteenth century, the Knight of La Mancha often represents the madness of self-belief... An elegant chapter in the history of aesthetics or criticism. Times Literary Supplement