James Noggle is professor of English at Wellesley College. He is author of The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford, 2001), and an editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society.

Noggle addresses taste in the abstract: the faculty itself as opposed to its many divergent manifestations ... he takes seriously a tradtion of aesthetic discourse from Addison and Shaftesbury onwards that explores the origin and nature of taste and seeks to identify in its working ... something more meaningful and enduring than arbitrary, subjective preference. The analysis is richly contextualized in fugitive journalism and verse

• Introduction: The Progress of Pleasure ; 1. Taste Against Taste in Pope's Epistle to Burlington ; 2. The Britishness of the Present at Stowe ; 3. <"Almost Inseparable>": Taste and History in Hume ; 4. Appearance as Experience: Three Women's Texts about Taste of the 1770s ; 5. The Power of Pure Contingency: Fashion in Smith and the Reynoldses ; 6. The Hell of Ownership: Beckford on Collecting ; Epilogue: Taste and the New Formalism ; Notes ; Works Cited

James Noggle is professor of English at Wellesley College. He is author of The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford, 2001), and an editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society.

Noggle addresses taste in the abstract: the faculty itself as opposed to its many divergent manifestations ... he takes seriously a tradtion of aesthetic discourse from Addison and Shaftesbury onwards that explores the origin and nature of taste and seeks to identify in its working ... something more meaningful and enduring than arbitrary, subjective preference. The analysis is richly contextualized in fugitive journalism and verse

• Introduction: The Progress of Pleasure ; 1. Taste Against Taste in Pope's Epistle to Burlington ; 2. The Britishness of the Present at Stowe ; 3. <"Almost Inseparable>": Taste and History in Hume ; 4. Appearance as Experience: Three Women's Texts about Taste of the 1770s ; 5. The Power of Pure Contingency: Fashion in Smith and the Reynoldses ; 6. The Hell of Ownership: Beckford on Collecting ; Epilogue: Taste and the New Formalism ; Notes ; Works Cited

James Noggle is professor of English at Wellesley College. He is author of The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford, 2001), and an editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society.

Noggle addresses taste in the abstract: the faculty itself as opposed to its many divergent manifestations ... he takes seriously a tradtion of aesthetic discourse from Addison and Shaftesbury onwards that explores the origin and nature of taste and seeks to identify in its working ... something more meaningful and enduring than arbitrary, subjective preference. The analysis is richly contextualized in fugitive journalism and verse

• Introduction: The Progress of Pleasure ; 1. Taste Against Taste in Pope's Epistle to Burlington ; 2. The Britishness of the Present at Stowe ; 3. <"Almost Inseparable>": Taste and History in Hume ; 4. Appearance as Experience: Three Women's Texts about Taste of the 1770s ; 5. The Power of Pure Contingency: Fashion in Smith and the Reynoldses ; 6. The Hell of Ownership: Beckford on Collecting ; Epilogue: Taste and the New Formalism ; Notes ; Works Cited