In Richard Pococke’s Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke’s famous eastern voyage from 1737-40, together with updated biographical accounts of the author and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles).

The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.

The Life and Works of Robert Wood (1717-1771) commemorates the Irish classicist and traveller on the 250th anniversary of his death and provides the general reader with a source book for the fascinating life and career of a much-neglected figure in the realm of Irish eighteenth-century travels and antiquarianism.

In English Explorers in the East (1738-1745). The Travels of Thomas Shaw, Charles Perry and Richard Pococke, Rachel Finnegan offers an account of the influential travel writings of three rival explorers, whose eastern travel books were printed within a decade of each other. Making use of historical records, Finnegan examines the personal and professional motives of the three authors for producing their eastern travels; their methods of researching, drafting, and publicising their works while still abroad; their relationships with each other, both while travelling and on their return to England; and the legacy of their combined works. She also provides a survey of the main features (both textual and visual) of the travel books themselves.

The Arabian Nights is a composite work consisting of popular stories originally transmitted orally and developed during several centuries, with material added somewhat haphazardly at different periods and places. This study was devoted to the impact of The Arabian Nights on four novelists of the nineteenth century: Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Meredith, and Robert Louis Stevenson. These authors were selected on the ground of their life spans, which encompassed almost the whole century. Because they are among the masters of the English novel, it is reasonable to assume that they did not content themselves with mere imitations resulting in pseudo-oriental tales. Their original creations assimilated the influences from The Arabian Nights, forming new unified structures with interwoven references and allusions, which are to be redetected.

This edition brings together in three fully edited volumes the correspondence and associated papers of Sir Joseph Banks regarding European and especially British exploration of Africa from 1767–1820, for the first time publishing this globally scattered material in one place, thereby revolutionizing its availability and understanding of the activities of a key figure who helped organize and publish a series of missions to penetrate the African interior, mainly from West Africa and by crossing the Sahara from Cairo and Tripoli. Banks was a founder in 1788 of the African Association, which mounted many of these missions, including those of Mungo Park to explore the River Niger, and J.L. Burkhardt exploring Syria, Arabia and Egypt. At the time, little was known about the African interior, its peoples, kingdoms and resources, and the aim of the African Association under Banks was to discover what lay there, to make contact with and study its societies, to map them and their lands and help establish trading links. Banks also maintained a lively correspondence with British diplomatic representatives in North Africa, such as James Mario Matra at Tangier and Henry Salt in Cairo, who were a rich source of news. Moreover, as unofficial director of the royal gardens at Kew he sent pioneering plant collectors to gather plants in South Africa, vastly boosting knowledge of this region’s important flora. At home, he corresponded with politicians, government officials, entrepreneurs, navigators, naturalists and campaigners like William Wilberforce about a great range of issues surrounding Africa. This work is multi-disciplinary and will stand alongside existing series of Banks’s correspondence published by Neil Chambers (Scientific Correspondence, 2007; Indian and Pacific Correspondence, 2007–14). It will appeal to scholars of African history in the Early Modern Period, to those studying exploration and collecting as well as those interested in natural history, the history of science, geography, cartography and the Enlightenment. An Introduction, detailed Calendar of Correspondents, Timelines for each volume and a comprehensive Index supplement the footnotes to nearly 800 documents included in this fascinating and comprehensive new series.

This is the first issue of the Writer and Their Work series to present an appreciation of a group, as opposed to a single writer. Great Britain has, for at least three centuries, sent a notable series of travellers to the Near East. Their work is critically examined in this essay by Mr Robin Fedden, who writes: 'The Near east is an area indeterminate and not easily defined. For my purposes it includes Arabia; it is bounded on the west by the Nile Valley, and on the east by the deserts that separate Damascus from the Euphrates. Others might set different limits. What, again, constitutes a 'traveller'? Those found here are chosen for literary talent rather than the extent of their peregrinations. I thus include an invalid in Egypt, an ambassador's wife in Constantinople, and (though war is hardly travel) T. E. Lawrence could not be left out.' Robin Fedden's sections on Kinglake and Doughty are particularly valuable, and he has much of interest to say on the work of contemporary writers such as Freya Stark and St. John Philby.

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.