This book concentrates on two pivotal moments in Edmund Burke's writing career and in the history of Britain in the eighteenth century – the publication of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/9) during the Seven Years War, and the publication of the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in response to the way the French Revolution was being admired by radicals in Britain. Although the book is divided into two parts which focus on each of these moments in turn, the interpretive strategy adopted throughout is continuously to read each text in terms of the other. I move forwards and backwards between the Enquiry and the Reflections in order to establish and complicate the relationship between them, showing that a rereading of the former demands and enables a reinterpretation of the latter. Simultaneously with this close attention to Burke's texts, I attempt to read the various ways in which they interact with a range of texts which constitute their different historical and discursive moments.

In the first part of the book, ‘Aesthetics for a bourgeois revolution’, I claim that Burke's early aesthetic treatise needs to be read not simply as a ground-breaking intervention within the proliferating discussion of aesthetics in Britain, but as a contribution to the hegemonic struggle of the rising middle class in the first half of the eighteenth century. This involves developing a reading of the Enquiry which foregrounds embedded relations there between aesthetics, politics, and economics.