Exploratory, investigative, and energetically analytical, 1650–1850 covers the full expanse of long-eighteenth-century thought, writing, and art while delivering abundant revelatory detail. Essays on well-known cultural figures combine with studies of emerging topics to unveil a vivid rendering of a dynamic period, simultaneously committed to singular genius and universal improvement. Welcoming research on all nations and language traditions, 1650–1850 invites readers int...

Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersec...

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age “resisted secularism” is by no means to argue that resi...

These thirteen essays have been collected to honor Melvyn New, professor emeritus (Florida), and are prefaced by a description of his scholarly career of more than forty years. Suggesting the wide range of that career, the first eight essays offer various critical perspectives on a diverse group of eighteenth-century authors. These include a reading of Eliot in the shadow of Pope; a comparison of Gainsborough’s final paintings and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey; a study of Johnson and casuis...

The enduring and engaging guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise.Newly expanded and updated to include standout works from the twenty-first century as well as ...

What PC English professors don't want you to learn from . . .- Beowulf: If we don't admire heroes, there's something wrong with us- Chaucer: Chivalry has contributed enormously to women's happiness- Shakespeare: Some choices are inherently destructive (it's just built into the nature of things)- Milton: Our intellectual freedoms are Christian, not anti-Christian, in origin- Jane Austen: Most men would be improved if they were more patriarchal than th...

An accessible, helpful guide for any student of Milton, whether undergraduate or graduate, introducing readers to the scope of Milton's work, the richness of its historical relations, and the range of current approaches to it. This second edition contains several new and revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Milton's politics, the social conditions of his authorship and the climate in which his works were published and received, a fresh sense of the importance of his early poem...

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern w...

Most English majors who take the GRE Literature in English test do not do particularly well, usually near the 50th percentile. To increase their acceptance into a graduate program (MA or PhD), test takers need at least to be over the 80th percentile. This is hard to do since ETS deliberately designs the test to befuddle most test takers. Quite frankly, these test takers simply do not know enough literature to excel. Further, they do not have the test "psyched" out, and they are lacking eff...

Frank Kermode is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the art of criticism in the English speaking world. It has been his distinction to make a virtue – as all the best critics have done – of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident on every page of this collection of essays.In one group of essays he asks the reader to share his pleasure in a number of major writers – Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens. In another, he discusses ideas about pro...

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol an...

Why do authors use pseudonyms and pen-names, or ingeniously hide names in their work with acrostics and anagrams? How has the range of permissible given names changed and how is this reflected in literature? Why do some characters remain mysteriously nameless? In this rich and learned book, Alastair Fowler explores the use of names in literature of all periods - primarily English but also Latin, Greek, French, and Italian - casting an unusual and rewarding light on the work of literature i...