18th Century Literature

Max Byrd’s compelling volume aims to provide a scholarly introduction to one of the most puzzling pieces of eighteenth-century literature, and a stimulus to critical thought and discussion. Tristram Shandy, first published in 1985, sketches Laurence Sterne’s life and literary antecedents, closely an..

Patricia Comitini's study compels serious rethinking of how literature by women in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries should be read. Beginning with a description of how evolving conceptions of philanthropy were foundational to constructions of class and gender roles, Comitini argues..

Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspec..

Focusing on the ways in which women writers from across the political spectrum engage with and adapt Wollstonecraft's political philosophy in order to advocate feminist reform, Andrew McInnes explores the aftermath of Wollstonecraft's death, the controversial publication of William Godwin's memoir o..

This book analyzes how major novelists of the long 18C centered on the theory and practice of gift exchange, challenging the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. It explores how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class an..

Focusing on female-authored home tour travel narratives, this study maps the way in which the changing face of British travel and its writing can be traced through the accounts of the women who participated in that tradition. Within these women's travelogues Kinsley explores the matters of gender, c..

Focusing on female-authored home tour travel narratives, this study maps the way in which the changing face of British travel and its writing can be traced through the accounts of the women who participated in that tradition. Within these women's travelogues Kinsley explores the matters of gender, c..

Wordsworth's Vagrants explores the poet's treatment of the 'idle and disorderly' in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From the Salisbury Plain poems through to Lyrica..

Arguing that the location of idealised maternity for women is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role, Davies plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. She exa..