In his long career as a writer Daniel Defoe never tired of advocating the value of personal observation and experience; and he never wavered in his conviction that it is man's God-given duty to explore and make productive use of nature. In this first major study of Bacon's legacy to Defoe Ilse Vickers shows that the ideas and concepts of Baconian science were a significant influence on Defoe's way of thinking and writing. She outlines the seventeenth-century intellectual milieu, and discusses the prominence of Defoe's teacher Charles Morton among major Baconian thinkers of the century. She...

William Walker's analysis of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding offers a challenging and provocative assessment of Locke's importance as a thinker, bridging the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussion of his work. He is revealed as a crucial figure for emerging modernity, less the familiar empiricist innovator and more a proto-Nietzschean thinker. Walker's reading of Locke is finely attentive to the text and resourceful in placing the Essay in its broadest philosophical and historical context.

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 textual authority through the texts on cultural-historical, biographical, and literary-theoretical levels. The historical interest lies in the occasions of the parodies: in their relations with the texts and discourses which they quote and distort, and...

Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis decribes the explosion of interest in fable from its origins at the end of the English Civil Wars to its decline, and shows how three Augustan writers--John Dryden, Anne Finch and John Gay--experimented with fable as a literary form. Often underestimated because of its links with popular nonliterary forms, fable is shown to have played a major role in the formation of the modern English culture.

A contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing concentrating on A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels.

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...

Tim Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Gilpin, Repton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others. He shows how landscape description formed part of a larger debate over the nature of liberty and authority in a Britain developing its sense of nationhood, and reveals the tensions that arose as writers sought to define their relationship to the public sphere. Fulford's innovative study offers a new view of literary and political influence linking the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Whereas previous studies have made George Berkeley (1685-1753) the object of philosophical study, Peter Walmsley assesses Berkeley as a writer, offering rhetorical and literary analyses of Berkeley's four major philosophical texts, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Alciphron, and Siris. Berkeley emerges from this study as an accomplished stylist who builds structures of affective imagery, creates dramatic voices in his texts, and masters the range of philosophical genres--the treatise, the dialogue, and the essay.

The Triumph of Augustan Poetics offers an important and original reevaluation of the transition from Baroque to Augustan in English literature. Starting with Butler's outrageous burlesque, Hudibras, Blanford Parker describes the origins of Augustan satire and its momentous departure from the religious and social writing of an earlier era. He goes on to explain the creation, from the ruins of satire, of a new poetry of nature and everyday life (emerging most significantly in the work of Pope and Thomson), and the ambiguous or hostile responses of writers including Samuel Johnson.

This study of Defoe's politics aims to challenge the critical demand to see Defoe as a "modern" and to counter misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full examination of Defoe's years as a political reporter and journalist (1689-1715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on contemporary issues: the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and how monarchies are created and maintained as the means of achieving a beneficent political order. At the heart of...