Volume Four covers poems published between 1693 and 1696, principally Dryden's translations from Juvenal and Persius, and those from Ovid and Homer included in the miscellany Examen Poeticum (1693). This new edition represents the most informative and accessible edition of Dryden's poetry, incorporating extensive new research and providing an invaluable resource for all those interested in English poetry and Restoration culture.

These first two volumes in a four-volume edition of Dryden's poems are the result of a complete reappraisal of the canon, text and context of his work. The text has been prepared from a fresh examination of the early printed editions, and takes account of the large number of manuscript copies which survive. Two recently discovered poems are included here for the first time. Headnotes to each poem provide details of the poem's date, publication history, sources and contemporary reception. Detailed explanations are given of the controversies addressed in his political poems, and particular attention is paid to Dryden's translations from classical writers including Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Lucretius. Volume I covers the poems of Dryden from 1649 to 1681.

Epic into Novel looks at Henry Fielding's adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the 'Trade of . . . authoring'. Fielding was always keen to stress that his novels were modelled on classical literature. Equally, he was fascinated by—and wrote at length about—the fact that they were objects to be consumed. He recognised that he wrote in an age when an author had to consider himself 'as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money.' In describing his work, he alludes both to Homeric epic and to contemporary cookery books. This tension in Fielding's work has gone unexplored, a tension between his commitment to a classical tradition and his immersion in a print culture in which books were consumable commodities. This interest in the place of the ancients in a world of consumerism was inherited from the previous generation of satirists. The 'Scriblerians'—among them Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope—repeatedly suggest in their work that classical values are at odds with modern tastes and appetites. Fielding, who had idolised these writers as a young man, developed many of their satiric routines in his own writing. But Fielding broke from Swift, Gay, and Pope in creating a version of epic designed to appeal to modern consumers. Henry Power provides new readings of works by Swift, Gay, and Pope, and of Fielding's major novels. He examines Fielding's engagement with various Scriblerian themes—primarily the consumption of literature, but also the professionalisation of scholarship, and the status of the author—and shows ultimately that Fielding broke with the Scriblerians in acknowledging and celebrating the influence of the marketplace on his work.

This volume contains the poems of Dryden extending from 1693 to 1696. Mostly these are translations of Roman poetry, specifically the satires of Juvenal and Persius, sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Amours, and Art of Love, passages from Homer and Virgil--as well as some elegies of contemporaries composed in his later years. Also included is Dryden's influential essay on the nature of satire entitled "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire."

Volumes V and VI concern Dryden's most involved labor: the complete translation of Virgil into English. Volume VI contains books 7-12 of The Aeneid, as well as commentary and textual notes to the full works of Virgil translated in these two volumes.