This volume completes the edition's coverage of Henry Fielding's journalism, which occupied a far greater part of his time than has been traditionally acknowledged. His contributions to The Champion are not only among his most energetic and intriguing works in the genre; they also have a densepolitical background, of interest to historians studying the interface between journalism and politicians of the time, as well as the role of newspaper publishers. Walpole figures hugely, and the extent to which Fielding hints at the minister's life and activities is remarkable.Much of the volume's material has never been reprinted before. Explanatory annotations are full, as the characteristically allusive and topical nature of Fielding's writing requires. Appendices provide an analytical textual apparatus, and the editorial introductions emphasize matters such as genesisand composition, circumstances of publication, in addition to immediate biographical, literary, and historical backgrounds.

"Empirical Wonder" focuses on the emergence of the fantastic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture. To do so, it preliminarily formulates an inclusive theory of the fantastic centering on nineteenth- and twentieth-century genres. The origins of such genres, this study argues, reside in the epistemological shift that attended the rise of empiricism, and their formal and historical identity becomes fully visible against the backdrop of pre-modern culture. While in pre-modern world-views no clear-cut distinction between the natural and the super- or the non-natural existed, the new epistemology entailed the emergence of boundaries between the empirical and the non-empirical, which determined, on the level of literary production, the opposition between the realistic and the non-realistic. Along with these boundaries, however, emerged the need to overcome them. In the seventeenth century, the religious supernatural and the existence of monsters were increasingly being questioned by modern science, and a variety of attempts were made to enact a mediation between what was perceived as unmistakably real and the problematic phenomena that were threatened by the empirical outlook: apparition narratives were used, for instance, to persuade skeptics of the presence of otherworldly beings, and travelogues often presented monsters as if they were empirical entities. Most of these attempts became soon incompatible with scientific culture, more and more normative, so the task of mediation was assumed by literature. Apparition narratives, originally conceived as factual texts, were progressively aestheticized; analogously, imaginary voyages grew different from fictionalized travelogues -- the success of Gulliver's Travels resetting the genre's main conventions and establishing a distinctly fictional model. Both apparition narratives and imaginary voyages emerged as self-consciously literary, that is, aesthetic, genres, bridging the gap between the empirical and the non-empirical. The origins of the fantastic ended when its mediatory task gave way to other concerns. Although on a residual level the mediation between the empirical and the non-empirical persisted, the fantastic's main preoccupations changed: in imaginary voyages its distinctive devices were used to dramatize or validate colonial practices, and Gothic fiction disconnected itself from the moral framework typical of apparition narratives.

An exhaustive study of satire in the long eighteenth century. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770, Ashley Marshall explores how satire was conceived and understood by writers and readers of the period. Her account is based on a reading of some 3,000 works, ranging from one-page squibs to novels. The objective is not to recuperate particular minor works but to recover the satiric milieu—to resituate the masterpieces amid the hundreds of other works alongside which they were originally written and read. The long eighteenth century is generally hailed as the great age of satire, and as such, it has received much critical attention. However, scholars have focused almost exclusively on a small number of canonical works, such as Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad, and have not looked for continuity over time. Marshall revises the standard account of eighteenth-century satire, revealing it to be messy, confused, and discontinuous, exhibiting radical and rapid changes over time. The true history of satire in its great age is not a history at all. Rather, it is a collection of episodic little histories.

Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen trace the translation of ethical debate into secular and gendered terms. Stewart argues that the seventeenth-century debate about ethics that divided Latitudinarians and Calvinists found its way into novels of the eighteenth century. Her book explores the growing belief that novels could do the work of moral reform more effectively than the Anglican Church, with attention to related developments, including the promulgation of Anglican ethics in novels as a response to challenges to Anglican practice and authority. An increasingly legitimate genre, she argues, offered a forum both for investigating the situation of women and challenging patriarchal authority, and for challenging the dominant political ideology.

Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: • Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts • Guides to key critics, concepts and topics • An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research • Case studies in reading literary and critical texts • Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. The Shakespeare Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare and early modern literature.

Asks: how did ancient Cynic philosophy come to provide a name for its modern, unphilosophical counterpart, and what events caused such a dramatic reversal of cynicism's former meanings? This work traces the concept of cynicism from its origins as a philosophical way of life in Greek antiquity.