This series aims to promote original scholarship on the intersection of British literature and history in the long eighteenth century, from the Restoration through the first generation of the Romantic era. Both "literature" and "history" are broadly conceived. Literature might include not only canonical novels, poems, and plays but also essays, life-writing, and belles lettres of all sorts, by both major and minor authors. History might include not only traditional political and social history but also the history of the book, the history of science, the history of religion, the history of scholarship, and the history of sexuality, as well as broader questions of historiography and periodization. The series editors invite proposals for both monographs and collections taking a wide range of approaches. Contributions may be interdisciplinary but should be grounded in sound historical research. All manuscripts should be written so as to be accessible to a wide audience while also making lasting contributions to the field.
By Marcus Tomalin
April 15, 2020
Although the broad topic of time and literature in the long eighteenth century has received focused attention from successive generations of literary critics, this book adopts a radically new approach to the subject. Taking inspiration from recent revisionist accounts of the horological practices ...
Edited
By Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, Karen Crawley
November 28, 2018
In this collection, the essays examine the critical role that judgments about noise and sound played in framing the meaning of civility in British discourse and literature during the long eighteenth century. The volume restores the sonic dimension to conversations about civil conduct by exploring ...
By Jakub Lipski
December 21, 2017
Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction focuses on the interrelationship between eighteenth-century theories of the novel and the art of painting – a subject which has not yet been undertaken in a book-length study. This volume argues that throughout the ...
By Srividhya Swaminathan, Adam R. Beach
October 19, 2016
In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term ’slavery’ to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the ’exotic’ slaving practices of the ...
By Eric Parisot
October 11, 2016
While immensely popular in the eighteenth century, current critical wisdom regards graveyard poetry as a short-lived fad with little lasting merit. In the first book-length study of this important poetic mode, Eric Parisot suggests, to the contrary, that graveyard poetry is closely connected to the...
By Elizabeth Kraft
September 20, 2016
In Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films, Elizabeth Kraft brings the canon of Restoration comedy into the conversation initiated by Stanley Cavell in his book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Before there could be imagined remarriages of the sort Cavell...
By Mona Narain, Karen Gevirtz
August 26, 2016
Between 1660 and 1820, Great Britain experienced significant structural transformations in class, politics, economy, print, and writing that produced new and varied spaces and with them, new and reconfigured concepts of gender. In mapping the relationship between gender and space in British ...
By Rosalind Powell
March 18, 2016
In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart’s translations and the place and function of translation in Smart’s poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart’s poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern ...
By Bonnie Latimer
January 28, 2013
Proposing that Samuel Richardson's novels were crucial for the construction of female individuality in the mid-eighteenth century, Bonnie Latimer shows that Richardson's heroines are uniquely conceived as individuals who embody the agency and self-determination implied by that term. In addition to ...
By Marcus Tomalin
April 07, 2016
From the 1750s to the 1830s, numerous British intellectuals, novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, translators, educationalists, politicians, businessmen, travel writers, and philosophers brooded about the merits and demerits of the French language. The decades under consideration encompass a ...
By Sharon Harrow
September 28, 2015
Sport as it is largely understood today was invented during the long eighteenth century when the modern rules of sport were codified; sport emerged as a business, a spectacle, and a performance; and gaming organized itself around sporting culture. Examining the underexplored intersection of sport, ...
By Teresa Barnard
July 14, 2015
Highlighting the remarkable women who found ways around the constraints placed on their intellectual growth, this collection of essays shows how their persistence opened up attributes of potent female imagination, radical endeavour, literary vigour, and self-education that compares well with male ...
