This definitive Companion provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent reshapings of the canon and identifies new directions of study. The Companion is composed of over fifty contributions from leading scholars in the field, its essays offer students a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field from a wide range of perspectives. It also, however, gives researchers and faculty the opportunity to update their acquaintance with new critical and scholarly work. The volume meets the needs of an intellectual world increasingly given over to inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary study by covering philosophical, political, cultural and historical writing, as well as literary writing. Unlike other similar volumes, the main body of the Companion consists of readings of individual texts, both those commonly and less commonly studied.

Katherine Philips (1632–1664) is widely regarded as a pioneering figure within English-language women’s literary history. Best known as a poet, she was also a skilled translator, letter writer and literary critic whose subjects ranged from friendship and retirement to politics and public life. Her poetry achieved a high reputation among coterie networks in London, Wales and Ireland during her lifetime, and was published to great acclaim after her death. The present volume, drawing on important recent research into her early manuscripts and printed texts, represents a new and innovative phase in Philips's scholarship. Emphasizing her literary responses to other writers as well as the ambition and sophistication of her work, it includes groundbreaking studies of her use of form and genre, her practices as a translator, her engagement with philosophy and political theory, and her experiences in Restoration Dublin. It also examines the posthumous reception of Philips’s poetry and model theoretical and digital humanities approaches to her work. This book was originally published as two special issues of Women’s Writing.