One of the first of Jane Austen's novels to be written, and one of the last to be published, Northanger Abbey is both an amusing story of how a naive girl enters society and wins the affection of a witty young clergyman, and a high-spirited parody of the lurid Gothic novels that were popular during Austen's youth. In the process it features a vivid account of social life in late eighteenth-century Bath, and Austen's famous defence of the novel as a literary form. This edition, based on the text of the novel as published posthumously in 1818, is accompanied by explanatory notes, and an...

Reflections on Sentiment not only addresses current scholarly interest in feeling and affect but also provides an occasion to celebrate the career of George Starr, who, in more than fifty years of incisive scholarship and committed teaching, haselucidated the work of Daniel Defoe and the role of sentimentalism in what was once reductively termed an age of reason and realism. Due to the critique Starr spearheaded, scholars today can approach with greater assurance the complex interplay of reason and emotion, thought and sensibility, science and feeling, rationality and enthusiasm, judgment and...

The cultural highlights of the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) have long been overlooked. However, recent scholarship, including the present volume, is demonstrating that Anne has been seriously underestimated, both as a person, and as a monarch, and that there was much cultural activity of note in what might be called an interim period, coming after the deaths of Dryden and Purcell but before the blossoming of Pope and Handel, after the glories of Baroque architecture but before the triumph of Burlingtonian neoclassicism. The authors of Queen Anne and the Arts make a case for Anne's reign as...