The Triumph of Augustan Poetics offers an important re-evaluation of the transition from Baroque to Augustan in English literature. Starting with Butler's Hudibras, Blanford Parker describes Augustan satire as a movement away from the 'controversial disputation' of the seventeenth century to a general satire which ridicules Protestant, Anglican ...
This original book takes a new look at problems surrounding the physical, material nature of the human body, in particular as represented in the works of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. It examines the role that literary invention (with its rhetorical and linguistic strategies) plays in expressing and exploring the problems of physicality, and ...
This critical introduction to Gulliver's Travels aims at giving a fresh and impartial account of the world-famous satire. It characterises the significant historical and literary background to the work, and explores the text itself in the reading order intended by Swift. It gives proper attention to Swift's narrative and stylistic art, and to the ...
Court studies and Jacobitism have both received considerable attention from historians in recent years, yet so far no attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive examination of the Jacobite court in exile after the revolution of 1688-9. This book takes a completely fresh look at the Stuart court in France during the years when the Jacobite ...
The aim of this book is to question and rewrite assumptions about the nature of the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology. Taking as its starting point the fundamental ambivalence of the Augustan concept the author studies canonical and non-canonical literature and uncovers a new 'four nations' literary history of the period ...
This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical ...
The first developments in the editing of English literary texts in the eighteenth century were remarkable and important, and they have recently begun to attract considerable interest, particularly in relation to conditions and constructions of scholarship in the period. This study sets out to investigate, rather, the theoretical and interpretative ...
Jonathan Swift's prose has been discussed extensively as satire, but its major structural element, parody, has not received the attention it deserves. Focusing mainly on works before 1714, and especially on A Tale of a Tub, this study explores Swift's writing primarily as parody. Robert Phiddian follows the constructions and deconstructions of ...
Narratives of Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary study of cosmopolitan approaches to the past. It reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - in the context of political and national ...
This volume completes Isabel Rivers' widely acclaimed exploration of the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. She investigates the effect of attempts to separate ethics from religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. Focusing on moral ...
This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Clement Hawes offers a ...
Poetry of Opposition and Revolution is an important new study of the relation between poetry and politics in English literature from Dryden to Wordsworth. Building on his argument in Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (also available from OUP), Howard Erskine-Hill reveals that the major tradition of political allusion is not, ...
The period 1660-1780 saw major changes in the relationship between religion and ethics in English thought. In this first part of an important two-volume study, Isabel Rivers examines the rise of Anglican moral religion and the reactions against it expressed in nonconformity, dissent and Methodism. Her study investigates the writings which grew out ...
Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. In The English Fable, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis describes the national obsession with Aesop's fables during this period as both a figural response to sociopolitical crises, and an antidote to emerging anxieties about ...
Written as a collection of letters in which very different accounts of the action are unsupervised by sustained authorial comment, Richardson's novel Clarissa offers an extreme example of the capacity of narrative to give the reader final responsibility for resolving or construing meaning. It is paradoxical then that its author was a writer ...
Eighteenth-century landscape description formed part of a larger debate over the nature of liberty and authority which was vital to a Britain newly defining its nationhood in a period of growing imperial power and rapid economic change. Tim Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Gilpin, Repton, ...
In this challenging and illustrated study, Simon Varey relates the idea of space in the major novels of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson to its use in the theory and practice of eighteenth-century architecture. Concepts of divine design, expressed in the work of philosophers and theologians, introduced an ideological element to the notion of space ...
This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period. The reader of novels shares with more scientific observers the activity of gazing on suffering, leading Ann Van Sant to explore the coincidence between the ...
The period 1660-1780 saw major changes in the relationship between religion and ethics in English thought. In this first part of an important two-volume study, Isabel Rivers examines the rise of Anglican moral religion and the reactions against it expressed in nonconformity, dissent and Methodism. Her study investigates the writings which grew out ...
This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only 'history' in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and ...
In the last three decades, the best work on Alexander Pope has been contextual and biographical. Without relegating the understanding of Pope gained by such study, this volume seeks to point the way back from context to text - from Pope's world to a fresh exploration of his verbal artistry, and the subtle processes of his composition and revision, ...
The early eighteenth century saw a far-reaching financial revolution in England, whose impact on the literature of the period has hitherto been relatively unexplored. In this original study, Colin Nicholson reads familiar texts such as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera and The Dunciad as 'capital satires', responding to the social and ...
Pope's letters are fascinating documents, apart from his importance as a poet. Highly revealing of his remarkable characterDSambitious, dangerous, trimming, ridiculous, intelligent, generous yet antagonisticDSthey also comprise a body of writing of extraordinary interest for an understanding of his times: its personalities, its plots, its ...
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