Primary texts: (chronologically arranged)
- Shaftesbury, Advice to an Author (1710)
- Characteristicks
- Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of our ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 1725.
- Alexander Pope. Of False Taste. An Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington. Occasion’d by his Publishing PALLADIO’s Designs of the BATHS, ARCHES, THEATRES, &c. of Ancient ROME. London, 1731.
- THE MAN of TASTE, OCCASION’D by an EPISTLE Of Mr. POPE’s On that SUBJECT. By the Author of the Art of Politicks. London, 1733.
- Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating IDEAS of TASTE. London, 1753.
- Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The second edition. With an intoductory DISCOURSE concerning TASTE, and several other additions. London, 1759.
- Gerard, Alexander. AN ESSAY ON TASTE WITH THREE DISSERTATIONS On the same SUBJECT BY Mr. De VOLTAIRE, Mr. D’ALEMBERT, F. R. S., Mr. De MONTESQUIEU. London, 1759.
- Voltaire ‘Goût’ in Dictionnaire Philosophique. Paris, 1764.
- ¾ Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses in Art. Ed. R. Wark. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. see The seventh Discourse. (1776).
- Hume, David. ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passions’ and ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ in Essays Moral, Political and Literary. London, 1777.
Secondary material:
- Auslander, Leora. Taste and power: furnishing modern France. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. La Distinction. Paris, 1979.
- Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
- Caygill, Howard. Art of Judgement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
- de Bolla, Peter. The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford, 1989.
- Dickie, George. The Century of Taste. The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Douglas, Mary. Thought Styles. Critical Essays on Good Taste. London: Sage Publications, 1996.
- Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, 1990.
- Haskell, Francis and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981.
- Jones, Robert. Gender and the social formation of taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Taste. An exhibition about Values in Design. Boilerhouse Project. Victoria and Albert Museum. London: The Conran Foundation, 1983.
- Walvin, James. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
- Zeldin, Theodore. A history of the French Passions, 1848-1945. Vol II. Intellect, Taste and Anxiety. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.