Originally published in 1972, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress, focuses upon the various disruptive forces in the literary culture of the Augustan period – upon ‘Nature’s Dance of Death’. His discussion centres on aspects of Fielding’s writing in relation to Augustan culture and civilization. He also relates the works of such Augustans as Pope, Swift and Smollett, as well as some twentieth century writings, to his overall theme. He treats, among other topics the crises in stylistic ‘urbanity’ and in the ‘mock-heroic’ styles of this historically and artistically fascinating period.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

The Conversational Circle offers a model for exploring a range of novels that experiment with narrative patterns. It makes a compelling case that teleological approaches to novel history that privilege the conflict between the individual and society are, quite simply, ahistorical. Twentieth-century historians of the early novel, most prominently Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Terry Castle, have canonized fictions that portray the individual in sustained tension with the social environment. Such fictions privilege a strongly linear structure. Recent reexaminations of the canon, however, have revealed a number of early novels that do not fit this mold. Betty Schellenberg identifies another kind of plot, one that focuses on the social group—the "conversational circle"—as a model that can affirm traditional values but just as often promotes an alternative sense of community. Schellenberg selects a group of mid-eighteenth-century novels that experiment with this alternative plot structure, embodied by the social circle. Both satirical and sentimental, canonical and non-canonical, these novels demonstrate a concern that individualistic desire threatened to destabilize society. Writing that reflects a circular structure emphasizes conversation and consensus over individualism and conquest. As a discourse that highlights negotiation and harmony, conversation privileges the social group over the individual. These fictions of the conversation circle include lesser-known works by canonical authors (Henry Fielding's Amelia and Richards's Sir Charles Grandison as well as his sequel to Pamela), long-neglected novels by women (Sarah Fielding's David Simple and its sequel Volume the Last, and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall), and Tobias Smollet's last novel, Humphrey Clinker. Because they do not fit the linear model, such works have long been dismissed as ideologically flawed and irrelevant.

Epic into Novel examines the work of Henry Fielding alongside other key eighteenth-century writers to examine how the conflicting influences of the classical tradition and the new literary marketplace were reconciled.

The relationship between Latitudinarian moral theology and eighteenth-century literature has been much debated among scholars. However, this issue can only be tackled if the exact objectives of the Latitudinarians' moral theology are clearly delineated. In doing so, Patrick Müller unveils the intricate connection between the didactic bias of Latitudinarianism and the resurgent interest in didactic literary genres in the first half of the eighteenth century. His study sheds new light on the complex and contradictory reception of the Latitudinarians' controversial theses in the work of three of the major eighteenth-century novelists: Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith.

In the twentieth century, literature was under threat. Not only was there the challenge of new forms of oral and visual culture. Even literary education and literary criticism could sometimes actually distance novels, poems and plays from their potential audience. This is the trend which Roger D. Sell now seeks to reverse. Arguing that literature can still be a significant and democratic channel of human interactivity, he sees the most helpful role of teachers and critics as one of mediation. Through their own example they can encourage readers to empathize with otherness, to recognize the historical achievement of significant acts of writing, and to respond to literary authors' own faith in communication itself. By way of illustration, he offers major re-assessments of five canonical figures (Vaughan, Fielding, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Frost), and of two fascinating twentieth-century writers who were somewhat misunderstood (the novelist William Gerhardie and the poet Andrew Young).

Campbell draws on recent work that sees the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the history of sexuality and gender, and she critiques new treatments of the novel's function in defining domestic femininity

Here we come to know Jane Austen by the company she keeps: her predecessors Fielding, Sterne, Lennox, and Burney, her contemporary Scott, and her successors Waugh and Amis—comic novelists all. And comedy is the connection between these twelve elegant essays by the distinguished academic Bruce Stovel, who most lovingly engages Austen herself through his studies of her comic novels, her art of conversation, her pleasure principle, and her prayers. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel, the collection includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and an afterword by Isobel Grundy.

Tracing their shared vision in such works as Memoirs of Scriblerus, Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera, and The Dunciad, Brückmann identifies the pastoral as their common ideal and analyses their shared hostilities and anxieties regarding the erosion of that ideal in an age they saw as grotesquely degenerate. She points out that in many ways the group was out of step with its own time and much more attuned to ancient and traditional images of felicity and to ancient authors who subscribed to these values. The influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who both figure as icons in the Scriblerians' work, as well as such authors as Seneca, Lucian, Lucius Apuleius, and François Rabelais is explored in detail. Looking forward, Brückmann highlights the Scriblerian influence on writers such as Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Robert Coover, and James Joyce, offering a place for dialogue between modern humanists and their eighteenth-century forebears.