New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation is a collection of essays by various hands that examines its point of focus, the inexhaustible English author Samuel Johnson, from a variety of different critical perspectives. The book also simultaneously interrogates particular texts (such as the Dictionary, the Lives of the Poets) alongside general themes (such as Johnson and intertextuality, Johnson and autobiography). The word “revaluation” from the title connotes both the deployment of specif...

This book is a collection of essays and a short story written to honor Christopher Fox of Notre Dame, arguably the most influential figure in Irish Studies for the past quarter century. The essays address topics in which Professor Fox has made his own enduring scholarly contributions, and subjects to which he has made enduring contributions through his academic leadership, from the development of library collections and important fellowships at his university to the institution of a global...

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s. These specially-commissioned essays avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to look at the century afresh. Chapters consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of 'sensibility'. Other chapters explor...

Volume 26 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era travels beyond the usual discussions of power, identity, and cultural production to visit the purlieus and provinces of Britain’s literary empire. Bulging at its bindings are essays investigating out-of-the-way but influential ensembles, whether female religious enthusiasts, annotators of Maria Edgeworth’s underappreciated works, or modern video-based Islamic super-heroines energized by Mary Wollstone...

For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700–1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed a...

Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and American literary history. This clear and engaging guide introduces the history, major writers and critical issues of this crucial era. This fully updated second edition includes:Discussion of a broad range of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. T...

An exhaustive study of satire in the long eighteenth century.Outstanding Academic Title, ChoiceIn The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770, Ashley Marshall explores how satire was conceived and understood by writers and readers of the period. Her account is based on a reading of some 3,000 works, ranging from one-page squibs to novels. The objective is not to recuperate particular minor works but to recover the satiric milieu—to resitu...

Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain.Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic p...

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol an...

English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century is an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, which can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This student Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, informs and illuminates the poetry by providing close reading of texts and an exploration of their background. There are individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbe...

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. She provided more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influenced the development of the novel with her ground-breaking fiction, especially Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister and Oroonoko, the first English novel set in America. Behn's work straddles the genres: beside drama and fiction, she also excelled in poetry an...

Rhetoric has long been a powerful and pervasive force in political and cultural life, yet in the early modern period, rhetorical training was generally reserved as a masculine privilege. This volume argues, however, that women found a variety of ways to represent their interests persuasively, and that by looking more closely at the importance of rhetoric for early modern women, and their representation within rhetorical culture, we also gain a better understanding of their capacity for pol...