In "Liberty of the Imagination," Edward Cahill uncovers the surprisingly powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination philosophical ideas about aesthetic pleasure, taste, genius, the beautiful, and the sublime on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth century. Far from being too busy with politics and commerce or too anxious about the morality of pleasure, American writers consistently turned to ideas of the imagination in order to comprehend natural and artistic objects, social formations, and political institutions. Cahill argues that...