This book originates in contributions to the ISECS International Young Scholars seminar held in Bordeaux in 1998, which brought together academics from all over the world to debate Aesthetics as an evolving concept in eighteenth-century thought. The essays it contains examine the development of fundamental aesthetic categories and structures in literature, art history, history and philosophy during the long eighteenth-century and contribute to our understanding of the idea of the Aesthetic, and to knowledge of some key tensions and modulations in form which caracterised the enlightenment.