Overview

This is an impressive and lucid survey of eighteenth-century intellectual life, providing a real sense of the complexity of the age and of the cultural and intellectual climate in which imaginative literature flourished.

Themes and Critique

It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as “Augustan Age”, “Age of Enlightenment”, and “Age of Reason”, which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.