More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

Anne Finch and Her Poetry is the first major critical examination of the life and works of the foremost English woman poet of the eighteenth century. This biography places Anne Finch (1661-1720) in her social and literary milieu and includes discussion of such topics as love and marriage, female friendships, melancholy, and nature as they relate both to Finch's life and to her poetry. Barbara McGovern gives considerable attention to the methods by which Finch developed her artistry and molded a largely masculine literary tradition to her own designs through a variety of rhetorical and stylistic devices. She examines the entire body of Finch's work, including two verse plays and a number of previously unpublished poems and letters, and corrects numerous misconceptions about the poet and her work. Though recognized in her lifetime as a talented poet, for nearly two hundred years Finch has been overlooked or, when anthologized, misrepresented. McGovern focuses on the historical place and displacement of Finch in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England in terms of her involvement with Britain's most critical religious and political controversies. An Anglican and Royalist who along with her husband was attached to the Stuart court at the time of the Glorious Revolution, Finch was an outsider because of her politics and religion as well as her gender. Despite her marginal status in society, Anne Finch was able to develop her poetic identity in part by defining her relationships with other early women writers, including Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. Her female friendships, as well as aristocratic family ties and titled position, gave her access to a number of the most famous literary figures of her age, including Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. A thoroughly researched, well-written, and compelling work, Anne Finch and Her Poetry will no doubt become the standard biography of the finest woman poet in England before the nineteenth century.