Buku Ajar Contemporary Literary Studies adalah panduan dalam pembelajaran sastra kontemporer pada khasanah kesusastraan Inggris. Cakupannya tentu saja kesusastraan yang termasuk ke dalam kesusastraan Inggris, baik dari Inggris Raya, Amerika, dan negara-negara persemakmuran Inggris pengguna Bahasa Inggris. Dalam buku ini, mahasiswa akan belajar mengenai hakekat dan batasan sastra Inggris kontemporer serta jenis-jenisnya. Tidak hanya itu, di bagian akhir, mahasiswa akan belajar melakukan analisis atau mini research mengenai sastra Inggris kontemporer.

During the first two decades of his career, Richardson’s role as printer was hardly limited to setting the type for the periodicals that issued from his shop. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of his intervention in producing text is the fact that both The True Briton (1723-24) and The Weekly Miscellany (1732-41) just happen to have letters supposedly from women who protest the legal restraints against their participation in the public sphere. Neither the Duke of Wharton, the owner of The True Briton, nor William Webster, the desperately impecunious producer of The Weekly Miscellany, launched their journals with the objective of advancing radical views about political equality for women. But almost inadvertently this middle-aged, rotund printer at Salisbury Court was quietly feminizing journalism. After his first experiments in Wharton’s anti-Walpole journal he developed his satiric powers in the Miscellany by creating not only his own feisty counterpart to Pope’s coquette Belinda but even partnering with Sarah Chapone’s subversive Delia. As an outlier in what was perceived to be a corrupt, predatory political world, Richardson readily assumed a female voice to express his resistance.

Bruce Redford re-creates the vibrant culture of connoisseurship in Enlightenment England by investigating the multifaceted activities and achievements of the Society of Dilettani. Elegantly and wittily he dissects the British connoisseurs whose expeditions, collections, and publications laid the groundwork for the Neoclassical revival and for the scholarly study of Graeco-Roman antiquity. After the foundation of the society in 1732, the Dilettani commissioned portraits of the members. Including a striking group of mock-classical and mock-religious representations, these portraits were painted by George Knapton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. During the second half of the century, the society’s expeditions to the Levant yielded a series of pioneering architectural folios, beginning with the first volume The Antiquities of Athens in 1762. These monumental volumes aspired to empirical exactitude in text and image alike. They prepared the way for Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809), which combines the didactic (detailed investigations into technique, condition, restoration, and provenance) with the connoisseurial (plates that bring the illustration of ancient sculpture to new artistic heights). The Society of Dilettanti’s projects and publications exemplify the Enlightenment ideal of the gentleman amateur, which is linked in turn to a culture of wide-ranging curiosity.