This volume completes the edition's coverage of Henry Fielding's journalism, which occupied a far greater part of his time than has been traditionally acknowledged. His contributions to The Champion are not only among his most energetic and intriguing works in the genre; they also have a densepolitical background, of interest to historians studying the interface between journalism and politicians of the time, as well as the role of newspaper publishers. Walpole figures hugely, and the extent to which Fielding hints at the minister's life and activities is remarkable.Much of the volume's material has never been reprinted before. Explanatory annotations are full, as the characteristically allusive and topical nature of Fielding's writing requires. Appendices provide an analytical textual apparatus, and the editorial introductions emphasize matters such as genesisand composition, circumstances of publication, in addition to immediate biographical, literary, and historical backgrounds.

In Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Paul Kelleher revises the history of sexuality from the vantage point of the literary history of sentimentalism. Kelleher demonstrates how eighteenth-century British philosophers, essayists, and novelists fundamentally reconceived the relations among sentiment, sexuality, and moral virtue. It is his contention that sentimental discourse, both philosophical and literary, posited heterosexual desire as the precondition of moral feeling and conduct. The author further suggests that sentimental writers fashioned the ideal of conjugal love as an ideological antidote to the theories of self-love and self-interest found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Heterosexual desire and its culmination in conjugal love, in other words, were represented as the privileged means for an individual to transcend self-love and to develop a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At the same time, Kelleher suggests, other pleasures and desires—particularly those rooted in same-sex eroticism—were increasingly depicted as antithetical to conjugal love and, thus, were morally devalued and socially disenfranchised. Kelleher's argument unfolds through close readings of a variety of texts, including Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s the Tatler and the Spectator, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Although these texts embody diverse rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns, he shows how they collectively reinforce an overarching sentimental ideology: on the one hand, heterosexual desire and conjugal love become synonymous with sympathy, benevolence, and moral goodness, while on the other hand, same-sex desire is pathologized as a selfish withdrawal from procreation, domesticity, sociability, and ultimately, “humanity” itself.

Eighteenth-century England did not only see the rise of the novel, but also the rise of genres of what we now call the fantastic, such as imaginary voyages and apparition narratives. Combining theoretical reflection and cultural analysis, the author of this book investigates the origins, and demonstrates the formal and historical identity of a great variety of texts, which have never been considered as part of the same family. The fantastic, he argues, is an intrinsically modern mode, which uses the devices of realistic representation to describe supernatural phenomena. Its origins can be found in the seventeenth century, when the rise of modern empiricism threatened the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of traditional religious culture. The author shows how a broad range of discursive formations - demonology, providential literature, teratology, and natural philosophy - attempted to reconcile world-views that were felt to be increasingly incompatible, and traces the development of a new kind of fiction that gradually replaced them and took over their work of reconciliation. Coalescing as an autonomous system of genres, free from the restrictions of modern science and at the same time self-consciously aesthetic, the fantastic emerged as an instrument both to affirm and to transcend the empirical vision.

An exhaustive study of satire in the long eighteenth century. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770, Ashley Marshall explores how satire was conceived and understood by writers and readers of the period. Her account is based on a reading of some 3,000 works, ranging from one-page squibs to novels. The objective is not to recuperate particular minor works but to recover the satiric milieu—to resituate the masterpieces amid the hundreds of other works alongside which they were originally written and read. The long eighteenth century is generally hailed as the great age of satire, and as such, it has received much critical attention. However, scholars have focused almost exclusively on a small number of canonical works, such as Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad, and have not looked for continuity over time. Marshall revises the standard account of eighteenth-century satire, revealing it to be messy, confused, and discontinuous, exhibiting radical and rapid changes over time. The true history of satire in its great age is not a history at all. Rather, it is a collection of episodic little histories.

Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen trace the translation of ethical debate into secular and gendered terms. Stewart argues that the seventeenth-century debate about ethics that divided Latitudinarians and Calvinists found its way into novels of the eighteenth century. Her book explores the growing belief that novels could do the work of moral reform more effectively than the Anglican Church, with attention to related developments, including the promulgation of Anglican ethics in novels as a response to challenges to Anglican practice and authority. An increasingly legitimate genre, she argues, offered a forum both for investigating the situation of women and challenging patriarchal authority, and for challenging the dominant political ideology.

Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: • Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts • Guides to key critics, concepts and topics • An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research • Case studies in reading literary and critical texts • Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. The Shakespeare Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare and early modern literature.

Asks: how did ancient Cynic philosophy come to provide a name for its modern, unphilosophical counterpart, and what events caused such a dramatic reversal of cynicism's former meanings? This work traces the concept of cynicism from its origins as a philosophical way of life in Greek antiquity.

What do 'stage directions' do in early modern drama? Who or what are they directing: action on the stage, or imagination via the page? Is the label 'stage direction' helpful or misleading? Do these 'directions' provide evidence of Renaissance playhouse practice? What happens when we put them at the centre of literary close readings of early modern plays? Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre investigates these problems through innovative research by a range of international experts. This collection of essays examines the creative possibilities of stage directions and and their implications for actors and audiences, readers and editors, historians and contemporary critics. Looking at the different ways stage directions make meaning, this volume provides new insights into a range of Renaissance plays.

Henry Fielding In Our Time publishes many of the papers presented at the international conference held at the University of London 19-21 April 2007 to commemorate the tercentenary of his birth. Written by established scholars, including the acknowledged doyen of Fielding scholars, Martin C. Battestin of the University of Virginia, as well as younger scholars who successfully bring their recent research to bear on neglected areas of Fielding’s life and works, the essays offer a cross-section of current approaches to Fielding and his writings, from his ballad operas, poetry and political journalism , via Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia—the novels for which he is still best known—to the social pamphlets written during his years at Bow Street as magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. The collection should appeal both to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics and general readers interested in the eighteenth-century in general, and Fielding’s contribution to the emergence and development of the novel form in particular.

This handbook is a guide to the kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century and it focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.