18th Century Literature

In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. While taking up the critical philosophical questions surroundin..

Defoe's Writings and Manliness is a timely intervention in Defoe studies and in the study of masculinity in eighteenth-century literature more generally. Arguing that Defoe's writings insistently returned to the issues of manliness and its contrary effeminacy, this book reveals how his writings drew..

Since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, the history of prose fiction has privileged the courtship plot. Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager's alternative history is richly contextualized in the legal history of marriage and divorce, en..

Since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, the history of prose fiction has privileged the courtship plot. Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager's alternative history is richly contextualized in the legal history of marriage and divorce, en..

This book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate in novels published from 1790 to 1820. The genre was among the few acceptable ways by which women could participate in public political debate; the book reveals how it works as a corrective not just on a..

Andrew Clark proposes a comprehensive interpretation of Diderot's entire literary, philosophical, and scientific oeuvre as the locus of a fundamental reconceptualization of the relation of part to whole - bee to swarm; organ to body; word to phrase; dissonant chord to harmonic progression; article t..

In her study of late eighteenth-century women novelists, Woodworth argues that women writers' ideas about their own liberty are present not only in their portrayal of heroines but also in their treatment of male characters. She suggests that Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Maria Edgewort..

A study of how travel writing and fiction developed as overlapping genres in the 18th Century, notably in the writings of Boswell, Sterne and Smollett...

A study of how travel writing and fiction developed as overlapping genres in the 18th Century, notably in the writings of Boswell, Sterne and Smollett...

In this innovative volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels claimed by both scholarly periods. Rather than simply opposing an Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress to a Romantic Period of inspiration, he..

In this innovative volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels claimed by both scholarly periods. Rather than simply opposing an Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress to a Romantic Period of inspiration, he..

This study examines the relationship between Enlightenment and romance through the work of James Macpherson and in particular his The Poems of Ossian. By re-reading Macpherson's work in ways not restricted by the sterile and by now largely settled debates over authenticity, Moore establishes Ossian..