Eighteenth-Century Characters offers a concise introduction to the eighteenth century, using characters as its starting point. Elaine M. McGirr presents contextualized readings of stock characters from canonical and popular literature, such as: - The rake and the fop - The country gentleman - The good woman - The coquette and the prude - The country maid and the town lady - The Catholic, the Protestant and the British Other. Each chapter explores how a character's significance and role changes over the century, illustrating and explaining radical shifts in taste, ideology and style. Also featuring illustrations, a Chronology and a helpful Bibliography and Further Reading section, this essential guide will provide students with the necessary background to understand the period's literature and to embark on further study.

This book provides an important rereading of dramatic language in the comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Demonstrating that comic wit of the late 1600s was a potent means by which to question orthodox political, social, and sexual values, this is the first work to draw significantly on postmodern theories to discuss the historical problems posed by late 17th-century dramatic style. Markley provides a dialogic account of style based on the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and gives revisionist reading of seventeenth-century stylistic theory.

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.