Subjective powers? Consumption, the reading public, and domestic woman in early eighteenth-century England

To summarize: from the early modern period, culture was increasingly mediated by the market, obliged to accommodate itself to the commodity form. Within the moral and aesthetic discourses of criticism and of "cultivation" that date also from this period, the emerging rationale for those works of culture for which high critical claims were advanced, placed them in some tension with their new commoditized form. Neither profitability nor popular appeal could be their raison d'etre. Their claims had to be grounded in their appeal to cultivated taste.