John Dussinger is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois where he taught for 36 years. He is author of The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974) and In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's World (1990), and has written numerous articles and reviews on iconic writers such as Swift, Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Middleton, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Johnson and Austen.