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 discusses the intersection between philosophy and literature during the British Enlightenment. Its primary focus is the work of moral philosophers during the first half of the eighteenth century, but its larger interest is in understanding how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel, and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.

Carol Flynn's challenging approach reviews the cost of being human, the 'expense' of material as opposed to spiritual life in eighteenth-century society, as it is revealed in its literature.

This highly original study of the "manic style" in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellows enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Its account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude that persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

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.