Over the last twenty years, critics and historians of the late Eighteenth-century have developed a multidisciplinary approach to the history of culture. This dialogue between literary critics and theorists, art historians and social historians is remapping the relations between culture and society, politics and aesthetics, law and representation. These essays by twelve internationally known scholars return 'Taste' to a central position in the discussion of nation, culture and aesthetics in the period.

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction Reforming Landscape: Turner and Nottingham; S.Daniels The Simple Life: Cottages and Gainsborough's Cottage Doors; A.Bermingham The Other Half of the Landscape: Thomas Heaphy's Watercolour Nasties; D.H.Solkin Chardin at the Edge of Belief: Overlooked Issues of Religion and Dissent in Eighteenth-Century French Painting; T.Crow The Sabine Women and Lévi-Strauss; T.J.Clark 'Love and Madness': Sentimental Narratives and the Spectacle of Suffering in Late Eighteenth-Century Romance; J.Brewer 'A Submission, Sir!': Who has the Right to Person in Eighteenth-Century Britain?; P.de Bolla Suspicious Minds: Spies and Surveillance in Charlotte Smith's Novels of the 1790s; H.Guest Wordsworth and Empire - Just Joking; D.Simpson Burns, Wordsworth, and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry; N.Leask Organic Form and it's Consequences; F.Ferguson Index