This collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory - influence and intertextuality. The study of influence tends to centre on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as sources or contexts for a given author. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history and social practices as well as other literary works. In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this...

Gleaning Modernity shows how earlier eighteenth-century literary texts might have eased the way for Britain's increasing modernity. They allowed Modern scenarios to be played out imaginatively, as simulations for experimental, predictive ends. The process spoke to the needs and desires of readers in a world of rapid, managed change. It worked unobtrusively first because of the practice of recycling old forms, as Pope and Richardson did, for example, with Horatian and tragic models, respectively; and second because given texts offered different readers a range of interpretative options. Along...

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780, originally published in 1981, considers poetry written between 1660 and 1780, a period which, although largely recovered from its nineteenth-century reputation, still attracts widely varying critical responses. Abandoning the old labels such as 'neoclassicism', 'romanticism' and 'sensibility', the author focuses on descriptions of genres and their formal elements and traces the broader patterns of literary and historical change running through the period. Eric Rothstein describes different poetic modes- panegyric, satire, pastoral and...