During the last quarter of the twentieth century social historians and historical critics have been cautiously developing a language for studying the arts that breaks out of a narrowly aesthetic vocabulary. We have become interested not so much in literature or art or music, not even in “the arts” altogether, but in a given society's cultural production. The full consequences for our sense of how individual arts or artists operated at any particular point in time will take a very long time to absorb.

Part of the problem here is that old-style “literary history” and “art history” constructed a continuous narrative with claims, which now seem remarkably fragile, to explain where art came from. Powerful figures within the art world were held to wield the influence of despots. In order to understand younger artists it was enough to show who they copied and who they reacted against. Cultural history is of course far more impersonal than this. It also registers types of event, and of historical change, held by literary history to be of secondary significance, such as the passing or the repeal of laws affecting state censorship or copyright, and the two or three major advances in the technology of book-production. During the eighteenth century a combination of legal, financial and industrial factors produced a huge expansion in the bulk and influence of print culture, working one of those transformations that truly deserves the term revolutionary: yet the century in which it took place is notorious for being one of the quietest on literary-historical record.