In this challenging and original 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. Drawing on a wide range of architectural books, Varey argues that space can become a political instrument used by its designers to establish conformity, assert power, and give form to the aspirations of social classes. As an example, he cites the city of Bath, a neo-classical city designed to reflect the political values of the empire. The discussion of the novels examines narrative as a...

This book looks at Dryden's literary relationships and implications for questions of literary reception, influence and intertextuality, as well as for the reputation and context of Dryden himself.

Donald Davie is the foremost literary critics of his generation and one of its leading poets. His career has been marked by a series of challenging and original critical interventions. The eighteenth century is the great age of the English hymn though these powerful and popular texts have been marginalized in the formation of the conventional literary canon. These are poems which have been put to the text of experience by a wider public than that generally envisaged by literary criticism, and have been kept alive by congregations in every generation. Davie's study of the eighteenth-century...

Robert South (1634-1716) was one of the great Anglican writers and preachers of his age. A contemporary of Dryden and Locke, he faced the profound political and philosophical changes taking place at the beginning of the Enlightenment in England. Gerard Reedy's book makes a strong case for the importance of his sermons, their complexity, beauty and wit, and their place in the history of post-Restoration English literature. Discussing sermons of South that deal with his theory of politics, language, the sacrament and mystery, Reedy reintroduces us to a lively and seminal master of prose,...

Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers challenging interpretations of the public and private faces of individualism in the eighteenth-century English novel. John P. Zomchick begins by surveying the social, historical and ideological functions of law and the family in England??'s developing market economy. He goes on to examine in detail their part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the protagonists in Defoe??'s Roxana, Richardson??'s Clarissa, Smollett??'s Roderick Random, Goldsmith??'s The Vicar of Wakefield and Godwin??'s Caleb Williams. Zomchick reveals in these novels an...

John Sitter makes a challenging claim for the importance of wit in the writings of Dryden, Rochester, Prior, Berkeley, Gay, Pope and Swift.

How was Alexander Pope's personal experience of women transformed into poetry? How characteristic of his age was Pope's attitude toward women? What was the influence of individual women such as his mother, Patty Blount and Lady Mary Montagu on his life and work? Valerie Rumbold's is the first full-length study to address these issues. Referring to previously unexploited manuscripts, she focuses both on Pope's own life and art, and on early eighteenth-century assumptions about women and gender. She offers readings of some of the well-known poems in which women feature prominently, and follows...

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 what happened when attempts were made to separate ethics from religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. Her book pays close attention to the movement of ideas through the British Isles, and demonstrates the enormous influence of Shaftesbury's moral thought. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study makes a vital contribution to our understanding...

Modern scholarship has represented Jonathan Swift as both an Old Whig and a non-Jacobite Tory. Ian Higgins' contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing and recorded opinion considers the interpretative problems they present. It explores the consonance of Swift's political writing with militant Jacobite Tory writing on affairs of Church and State, and demonstrates Swift's dissimilarity from the Old Whig writers with whom modern criticism has misleadingly identified him. Swift's writings of the 1690s, during the last four years of Queen Anne's reign, and after the Hanoverian succession...

Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure that is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and understanding grammar: taking as their starting point the position that the very integrity of grammar is bound up with its place in the larger schemes of the organization of human conduct, particularly social interaction, their essays explore a rich variety of linkages between interaction and grammar.