Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

In his Enquiry—which has been described as "certainly one of the most important aesthetic documents that eighteenth -century England produced"—the young Burke provided a systematic analysis of the 'sublime' and the 'beautiful,' together with a distinctive terminology which served to express certain facets of the changing sensibility of his time.

The introduction traces the main sources of Burke’s ideas and establishes the nature of his originality. The largest section of the editor’s introd...