This book seeks to rewrite assumptions about the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology. The author studies canonical and noncanonical literature and uncovers a new "four nations" literary history defined in terms of a struggle for control of the language of authority between Jacobite and Hanoverian writers. Sources explored include ballads in Scots, Irish, Welsh and Gaelic. The author concludes that the literary history of the Augustan age is built on the history of the victors in the Revolution of 1688.

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.

This new critical introduction to Gulliver's Travels provides a fresh and impartial account of this world-famous satire. It presents Swift's work in its historical and literary context, and explores its allusions, its four-part structure, its narrative strategy and its prose style. A final chapter sketches the fictional aftermath of the Travels from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and there is a guide to further reading.

This extended study of the treatment of the physical, material nature of the human body in the works of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe examines the role that literary invention (with its rhetorical and linguistic strategies) plays in expressing and exploring the problems of physicality. The book takes up a wide range of issues relating to the body such as sexuality, cannibalism, scatology, and the fear of contagion. In an eclectic synthesis of recent critical approaches, Professor Flynn draws insight from biographical and psychoanalytic criticism as well as social history. Application of...

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 that grew out of these movements, combining a history of the ideas of individual thinkers (including both prominent figures such as Bunyan and Wesley and a range of lesser writers) with analysis of their characteristic terminology, techniques of persuasion,...

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...

This book seeks to rewrite assumptions about the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology. The author studies canonical and noncanonical literature and uncovers a new "four nations" literary history defined in terms of a struggle for control of the language of authority between Jacobite and Hanoverian writers. Sources explored include ballads in Scots, Irish, Welsh and Gaelic. The author concludes that the literary history of the Augustan age is built on the history of the victors in the Revolution of 1688.

Narratives of Enlightenment reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the eighteenth century--Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay--in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America. Where previous studies have emphasized the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, Karen O'Brien reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of "authority," the creation of a readership attuned to the writer's resonance, and a delicate negotiation between literary tradition and individual talent. Leading scholars focus on the presentation of major poetic texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, making comparisons across boundaries of generic form. The book includes consideration of the work of Spenser, Milton, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, and...