Michael McKeon

This book “historicizes” the British Enlightenment, 1650-1800, as the beginning of the modern world by reconstructing what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that have come to define the character of daily existence.

The Enlightenment has been misconceived as the culmination of traditional thought about art and literature. The focus of Volume 2 is instead the Enlightenment innovation of the modern concept of the aesthetic and its most important features, which has been wrongly credited to later generations.