The middle decades of the eighteenth century—the years that fall between the much-studied ages of Pope and of Johnson—constitute a fascinating, though neglected, period in English literature. John Sitter's book is a literary history of the 1740s and 1750s, a time of great experimentation and innovation, and a time to which the origins of many of the literary criteria of the current day can be traced. Studying the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the mid-eighteenth century, Sitter attempts to characterize the authors' shared pursuits and preoccupations. He focuses on what he calls literary loneliness—the emerging concept of the isolated writer who creates for a solitary reader, a writer who strives for a "pure poetry" unconnected to political and historical particulars. Tracing the literary changes that took place during the period, Sitter studies the early works of David Hume and the increasingly visionary writings of William Law; he considers the profound and puzzling break with the past manifested in contemporary poetry; and he analyzes the similar artistic premises and authorial difficulties apparent in the longer poems of Thomson, Young, and Akenside, and in the last novels of Richardson and Fielding. Their literary assumptions are still part of our critical tradition, Sitter says, and in his conclusion he notes some significant correspondences between mid-eighteenth- century literature and twentieth-century criticism. Anyone who studies the literature or the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, or who is concerned with the theory of literary history, will find Literary Loneliness rewarding reading.

This book analyzes major premises and practices of eighteenth-century English poets.

The poetry of the mid- and late-eighteenth century has long been regarded as primarily private and apolitical; in this wide-ranging study Dustin Griffin argues that in fact the poets of the period were addressing the great issues of national life--rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, an emerging new British national identity. Taking up the topic of patriotic verse, Griffin shows that poets such as Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of true patriotism.

This engaging book introduces new readers of eighteenth-century texts to some of the major works, authors, and debates of a key period of literary history. Rather than simply providing a chronological survey of the era, this book analyzes the impact of significant cultural developments on literary themes and forms - including urbanization, colonial, and mercantile expansion, the emergence of the "public sphere," and changes in sex and gender roles. In eighteenth-century Britain, many of the things we take for granted about modern life were shockingly new: women appeared for the first time on stage; the novel began to dominate the literary marketplace; people entertained the possibility that all human beings were created equal, and tentatively proposed that reason could triumph over superstition; ministers became more powerful than kings, and the consumer emerged as a political force. Eighteenth-Century English Literature: 1660-1789 explores these issues in relation to well-known works by such authors as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, and Sterne, while also bringing attention to less familiar figures, such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Leapor, and Olaudah Equiano. It offers both an ideal introduction for students and a fresh approach for those with research interests in the period.

Exploring territory seldom visited by feminist scholars, Ann Messenger in this new book presents eight studies of literary relationships between men and women writers, ranging from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays show men and women working together, praising and criticizing each other's work, borrowing—and changing—each other's plots and characters, recording their different perceptions of their common world. From Dryden's praise of Anne Killigrew, through Gay's and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's collaboration on a town eclogue, Thomas Southerne's dramatizations of novels by Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood's version of the Spectator, to Cornelia Knight's sequel to Rasselas, these relationships demonstrate that men and women writers inhabited the same literary world, shared the traditions of the mainstream of English literature. Most of the women have since faded from view. But Messenger suggests the time has come to rediscover them, to reassess their work, and to revise the commonly accepted canon of literature accordingly. Although most of the studies deal with the way women's writing responds to writing by men, the Afterword combats the charge that the women's work is "derivative." Free of critical jargon and ideological strait-jacketing, His and Hers makes some little-known writers available and interesting to specialists and nonspecialists, feminists and traditionalists, alike, while it sheds new light on some of the most familiar figures of the period. The Appendix reprints some of the shorter works which have been analyzed in detail, and summaries in the text help to compensate for the unavailability of some of the women's books. The comparative approach suggests a wide and rich field for further research.

A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.