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David Womersley's book investigates Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history.

Laurence Sterne's quotations, plagiarisms and allusions were often employed in the service of the pleonasm, or 'performed pun'. Jonathan Lamb describes Sterne's operation of the pleonasm as his 'double principle'. He asks why the collection and arrangement of fragments had such an appeal for Sterne, and why his most original effects are derived from imitations and repetitions.

Dr Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others, showing how such descriptions formed part of a larger debate about liberty and authority, and offering connections between eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and politics.

Donald Davie is one of the foremost literary critics of his generation and a poet of some renown. His study of the eighteenth-century English hymn reclaims a rich and important literary genre which has been strangely neglected by literary critics.

In this sequel to his earlier book on English criminal biography in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, Lincoln Faller describes and discusses some of the ways in which Defoe's crime fiction relates to the ordinary, popular narrative form which it imitates.

Comic and satiric literature from the 1670s to the 1740s is characterized by the word play of Augustan wit. John Sitter makes a challenging claim for the importance of wit in the writings of Dryden, Rochester, Prior, Berkeley, Gay, Pope and Swift, as an analytic mode as well as one of stylistic sophistication.

This book draws upon social, political and legal history to show that law and family play a central role in shaping the fictional world of six eighteenth-century English novels.

Robert South (1634-1716) was one of the great Anglican writers and preachers of his age. Gerard Reedy's book, the first major study of South, makes a strong case for the importance of his sermons (their complexity, beauty and wit, and their place in the history of post-Restoration English literature).

In this challenging study, first published in 1990, Simon Varey relates the idea of spatial design in the major novels of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson to its use in the theory and practice of eighteenth-century architecture. He draws on a wide range of architectural books, as well as such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones.

The works of George Berkeley (1685-1753) have been the object of much philosophical analysis; but philosophers are writers as well as thinkers, and Berkeley was himself positively interested in the functions of language and style. This 1990 book offers rhetorical and literary analyses of his four major philosophical texts.

How was Alexander Pope's personal experience of women transformed into poetry, and how in turn did he and his writing figure in the lives of the women he wrote about? How characteristic of his age was Pope's attitude towards women? What exactly was the role in his life of individual women such as his mother, Patty Blount and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu?

Carol Flynn's challenging approach reviews the cost of being human, the 'expense' of material as opposed to spiritual life in eighteenth-century society, as it is revealed in its literature.

This study restores Defoe's writings and ideas to their seventeenth-century context.

The first study of a century of sea-going narratives, which puts the accounts of Captain Cook and Captain Bligh in the context of narratives of convicts, passengers, and victims of the press-gang. It is a book about writing rather than explorations which reveals narratives of great energy and vitality.

This book offers an important re-evaluation of the transition from Baroque to Augustan in English literature. Analysing works by Butler, Pope, Thomson, Johnson, and many others, Blanford Parker's account explains the origins of Augustan satire, its momentous departure from earlier models, and the subsequent creation of a new poetry of nature and everyday life.

This volume completes a widely acclaimed exploration of religion and ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It investigates attempts to separate ethics from religion, and instead to locate the morals in human nature. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study makes a vital contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century thought.

The period 1660-1780 saw major changes in the relationship between religion and ethics in English thought. In this first part of an important two-volume study, Isabel Rivers examines the rise of Anglican moral religion and the reactions against it expressed in nonconformity, dissent and Methodism.

Ian Higgins' contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing concentrates on the partisan meanings of the great satires A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, and represents Swift (as he was read by his contemporaries) as a disaffected High Church Anglican extremist with Jacobite inclinations.

John Goodridge explores the role of rural poetry in eighteenth-century literary culture. He examines the purpose of rural poetry, and how it relates to the real world, analyses accounts of rural labour by self-taught poets, and reveals unexpected links between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments of the time.

Parody has not received the attention it deserves as the major structural element of Jonathan Swift's prose. Robert Phiddian explores the parody in Swift's early texts, especially A Tale of a Tub, and throws new light both on the theory of parody and on developments in British culture in the eighteenth century.

This book discusses the intersection between philosophy and literature during the British Enlightenment. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.

Marcus Walsh demonstrates that the work of pioneering editors of Milton and Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, was based on sophisticated and clearly articulated theories and methods. He relates these to contemporary interpretations of the Bible and key issues in modern editorial theory.

This highly original study identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart, and offers a powerful critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

Robert Mayer explores the meaning of 'history' in the seventeenth century and shows how the narratives of Daniel Defoe, unlike those of Aphra Behn, were read in their own time as history. Mayer's study makes an important contribution to the debate about the origins of the modern novel in Britain.

This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period.

Between 1651 and 1740 there was in England an explosion of interest in Aesop's fables, and in the fable as a literary form. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis shows how the fable, often underestimated because of its links with popular non-literary forms, played a major role in the formation of modern English culture.

This book questions assumptions about the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology in canonical and non-canonical literature. The 'four nations' literary history emerges, defined in terms of a struggle for control of the language of authority between Jacobite and Hanoverian writers.

In this original study, Colin Nicholson reads familiar texts such as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera and The Dunciad as 'capital satires', responding to the social and political effects of London's new capitalist financial institutions: the Bank of England, the National Debt and the South Sea Bubble disaster of 1721.

William Walker's original analysis of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding offers a challenging and provocative assessment of Locke's importance as a thinker, bridging the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussion of his work.

Narratives of Enlightenment reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the eighteenth century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - and reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national issues.