18th Century Literature

Arguing for wit's importance beyond its use as a literary device, Lund traces the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He shows how fear of wit as a subversive rhetorical form threatening church a..

Arguing for wit's importance beyond its use as a literary device, Lund traces the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He shows how fear of wit as a subversive rhetorical form threatening church a..

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling the student or researcher to read the material themselves...

First published in 1979, this title presents the basic facts and the background information needed by a modern reader of Robinson Crusoe, as well as a careful exploration of the structure and style of the work itself. Pat Rogers pays particular attention to the book’s composition and publishing hist..

Gulliver and the Gentle Reader critically examines the writing of Jonathan Swift. The book is predominately concerned with what Rawson coins ‘the "unofficial" energies’ which work below the surface of Swift’s conscious themes...

Originally published in 1972, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress, focuses on the various disruptive forces in the literary culture of the Augustan period. His discussion centres on aspects of Fielding’s writing in relation to Augustan culture and civilization...

First published in 1955, this exegesis on the writings of Alexander Pope reveals the technical felicities of his poetry, and is the first to be devoted to the great meaning inherent in his work. This book adds much to what is already known of Pope, and will go far in reviving an interest in the work..

By examining the motif of ruination in a variety of late-eighteenth-century domains, this book portrays the moral aesthetic of the culture of sensibility in Europe, particularly its negotiation of the demands of tradition and pragmatism alongside utopian longings for authenticity, natural goodness, ..

Considering canonical and lesser-known works by authors that include Rousseau, Sade, Bastide, Laclos, Crébillon fils, and the writers of two widely read libertine novels, Paul Young suggests that narratives of seduction function as a master plot for eighteenth-century French literature. How authors ..

Arguing that the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of an important female poetic tradition, Knowles analyzes the poetry of the Della Cruscans, Charlotte Smith, Susan Evance, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning in the context of a mass literary culture and the..

This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing togethe..

Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship..