The subject of this book is the story of the conflict between Gibbon and those he mockingly dubbed the "Watchmen of the Holy City," and it explores the ramifications of an elusive aspect of authorship. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, Womersley makes possible a more intimate understanding of what might be called Gibbon's experience of himself. At the same time he deepens our knowledge of the conditions of English authorship during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This new anthology provides seventeen key plays by twelve dramatists of the Restoration period in an anthology designed specifically for course use, with annotations and judiciously modernized texts. It offers a representative sampling of the types of play of the period, including plays by both men and women - sex comedy, moral comedy, heroic drama, Shakespearean adaptation and political history.

This definitive companion provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent configurations of the canon and points to new directions of study.

The two plays presented in full in this volume - Wycherley's The Country Wife and Congreve's The Way of the World - illustrate the evolution of Restoration comedy between 1675 and 1700.

• Includes full texts of Wycherley's The Country Wife and Congreve's The Way of the World.


• Demonstrates how Restoration comedy evolved between 1675 and 1700.


• Introduces general readers or students to the genre.


• An editorial introduction guides readers through the plays and the period.
...

The two plays presented in full in this volume - Wycherley's The Country Wife and Congreve's The Way of the World - illustrate the evolution of Restoration comedy between 1675 and 1700.

• Includes full texts of Wycherley's The Country Wife and Congreve's The Way of the World.


• Demonstrates how Restoration comedy evolved between 1675 and 1700.


• Introduces general readers or students to the genre.


• An editorial introduction guides readers through the plays and the period.
...

David Womersley's book investigates Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work's transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally...

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed 'certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred'.
How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth-century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a...