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.

Born on 7th March, 1983 and educated from Visva Bharati, Dr. Sudeshna Majumdar completed her M. A. in English literature in 2007 and obtained Ph.D. degree in 2014 from Visva Bharati. At present she is working as Assistant Professor of English at Rampurhat College, Birbhum. In 2011 She participated in the UGC sponsored National Level Translation Workshop of ‘Indian English Poetry into Bangla’, organized by DEOMEL, Visva Bharati, and the poems translated by her were published in the volume Bharatiya Engraji Kobita: A Collection of Indian English Poetry (2013), edited by Somdatta Mandal and Soma Mukhopadhyay. Interested in creative writing, painting and music, Sudeshna has published two collections of her poems in Bangla: Akash Ki Shudhu Neel in 1997 and Jol Chhunye Jao in 2009. She is also writing and publishing several scholarly articles in various reputed journals and books across India. Her contact - soomaz2@gmail.com