"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."
