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...

This study sets out to investigate the theoretical and especially the interpretative bases of eighteenth-century literary editing. Extended chapters on Shakespearean and Miltonic commentary and editing demonstrate that the work of pioneering editors and commentators, such as Patrick Hume, Lewis Theobald, Zachary Pearce, and Edward Capell, was based on developed, sophisticated, and often clearly articulated theories and methods of textual understanding and explanation. Marcus Walsh relates these interpretative theories and methods to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglican biblical...

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 sets out to investigate the theoretical and especially the interpretative bases of eighteenth-century literary editing. Extended chapters on Shakespearean and Miltonic commentary and editing demonstrate that the work of pioneering editors and commentators, such as Patrick Hume, Lewis Theobald, Zachary Pearce, and Edward Capell, was based on developed, sophisticated, and often clearly articulated theories and methods of textual understanding and explanation. Marcus Walsh relates these interpretative theories and methods to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglican biblical...

This is the first full study of one of the most popular and extensive forms of eighteenth-century literature, the voyage narrative. It illustrates the wide variety of published and unpublished material in this field, from self-satisfied official accounts to the little-known narratives of victims of the press-gang. It includes a survey of writings about the Pacific - including Cook's voyages and Bligh and The Bounty; there is a major new study of William Dampier, studies of writings about the slave-trade, and accounts of seamen and passengers, including Fielding and Mary Wollstonecraft. This...

Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has radically changed our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. Here John Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labor by James Thomson, Stephen Duck and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of John Dyer's The Fleece. Goodridge goes on to explore the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments of the time.

Written as a collection of letters in which very different accounts of the action are unsupervised by sustained authorial comment, Richardson's novel Clarissa offers an extreme example of the capacity of narrative to give the reader final responsibility for resolving or construing meaning. It is paradoxical then that its author was a writer committed to avowedly didactic goals. Tom Keymer counters the tendency of recent critics to suggest that Clarissa's textual indeterminacy defeats these goals by arguing that Richardson pursues subtler and more generous means of educating his readers by...

Exploration of the meaning of 'history' and its relevance for the origins of the modern English novel.

An original study of the early eighteenth century's financial revolution in the literature of the period.

This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period. The reader of novels shares with more scientific observers the activity of gazing on suffering, leading Ann Van Sant to explore the coincidence between the rhetoric of pathos and scientific presentation as they were applied to repentant prostitutes and children of the vagrant and criminal poor. The book goes on to explore the novel's location of psychological responses to suffering in physical forms. Van Sant...