The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar is a utopian novel in two parts. In this scholarly edition, G.E. Bentley, Jr, places George Cumberland's late eighteenth-century work among the earliest historical novels in English and identifies it as a rare example of the "Romantic novel." He shows that while each part of the work adopts a very different form of utopia, the two utopias complement and modify one another. He also shows the work to be unusual for the sexual and political freedom encouraged and the Christian fundamentalism advocated, as well as for its setting, in lands never visited by Europeans at the time of writing.

The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth century, British examples of the genre outpaced their American cousins in length, frequency of publication, attention to anthropological detail, and subjective complexity. Using both new and canonical texts, Snader shows that foreign captivity was a favorite topic in eighteenth-century Britain. An adaptable and expansive genre, these narratives used set plots and stereotypes originating in Mediterranean power struggles and relocated in a variety of settings, particularly eastern lands. The narratives' rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions often grew out of centuries of religious strife and coincided with Europe's early modern military ascendancy. Caught Between Worlds presents a broad, rich, and flexible definition of the captivity narrative, placing the American strain in its proper place within the tradition as a whole. Snader, having assembled the first bibliography of British captivity narratives, analyzes both factual texts and a large body of fictional works, revealing the ways they helped define British identity and challenged Britons to rethink the place of their nation in the larger world.

It is not surprising that visitors to Blake’s cosmology – the most elaborate in the history of British text and design – often demand a map in the form of a reference book. The entries in this volume benefit from the wide range of historical information made available in recent decades regarding the relationship between Blake’s text and design and his biographical, political, social, and religious contexts. Of particular importance, the entries take account of the re-interpretations of Blake with respect to race, gender, and empire in scholarship influenced by the groundbreaking theories that have arisen since the first half of the twentieth century. The intricate fluidity of Blake’s anti-Newtonian universe eludes the fixity of definitions and schema. Central to this guide to Blake's work and ideas is Kathryn S. Freeman's acknowledgment of the paradox of providing orientation in Blake’s universe without disrupting its inherent disorientation of the traditions whereby readers still come to it. In this innovative work, Freeman aligns herself with Blake’s demand that we play an active role in challenging our own readerly habits of passivity as we experience his created and corporeal worlds.

The Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries records articles of scholarly value that relate to the history of the printed book, to the history of arts, crafts, techniques and equipment, and of the economic, social and cultural environment involved in their production, distribution, conservation and description.

A clearly written account of the development of the novel over the course of the long eighteenth century.

One of Jerry’s greatest talents was creating research pretexts to travel to the far corners of the globe. He explored England and continental Europe, first as a student and later when he returned regularly for research. Once he had settled into his career at the University of Toronto, Jerry sought adventure with his young family while teaching for a year in places which did not at the time attract many Western academics - Algeria in the 1960s, India in the 1970s, China in the early 1980s. In each of these places he found expectations about teaching, university administration and social interactions vastly different, often baffling, and always entertaining. The volume concludes with three essays in which Jerry chronicles his academic endeavours, as a scholar of William Blake, forms the basis of the most important collection of Blake works in Canada. With eloquence and humour, Jerry brings to life in Boondoggles the people he met and the grandeur of the places he visited, as both a restless professor and an endlessly curious observer of human nature, long before the era of mass tourism made such travels commonplace.