‘The Serpentina within the Pyramid’

The eighteenth-century English aesthetic perspective concentrated on the remodelling of certain cultural spaces and practices on the tenets of balance and propriety, an idea propagated by the Enlightenment. However, this idea was not discernible in the entire corpus of the English society and culture that were marked by a sense of randomness at the threshold of Industrial Revolution. The book explores how certain aesthetic spaces were highlighted in the eighteenth-century English culture as the fallout of the evolving value-structure of the nascent middle class and how the theatrical, fictional and visual modes of representation of that era accommodated this cultural debate between morality and excess within literary and artistic spaces. Both the writer and the artist offered a blend of social realism and social critique as their strategies of representation. Realistic art and literature thus transcend the realm of mere imitation and enter the realm of an evaluative zone.