Engagements With Eighteenth-Century Literature

List of contents

Part One: Overview of Eighteenth-Century Literature Introduction

1. Political and Religious controversies


2. Union and Nationalism


3. Colonialism and Empire (including the slave trade)


4. Politics and Protest


5. Religion, Dissent, and Toleration


6. Revolution¿"Glorious," American, French


7. Literacy, Publication, and Authorship
Text box: Grub Street


8. The Enlightenment


9. The Arts, particularly painting and music
Text box: Handel and the German influence


10. Critical Approaches


1. Context and contested history


2. Gender and Genre


3. Class


4. Form


11. Eighteenth-Century Genres


1. Drama and the English Stage (comedy, tragedy, pantomime, afterpiece, spectacle, opera, semi-opera)


2. Religious writing¿sermons, hymns, apocalypse (Milton, Wigglesworth, Penn¿s Good Advice to the Church of England, Bunyan, Swift¿s A Tale of a Tub, Edwards, William Law, Hume, Wesley, Whitefield, Wollstonecraft, Malthus)


3. Poetry and Poetic Form


1. The Heroic Couplet


2. The Ode


3. The Hymn


4. The Ballad


5. The Sonnet Revival


6. Blank Verse


4. Fiction and the Novel (Defoe through Austen)
Text box: Defoe¿s short story "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal"


5. Essays for "Enlightenment"


1. Philosophy: Locke, Berkeley, Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Wollstonecraft, Godwin


2. The Poetic Essay (Dryden, Pope, Akenside, Erasmus Darwin)


3. Journalism and the Press (Defoe, Addison, Steele, Franklin, Haywood, Johnson, Bell, Stuarts, Hunt, Gentleman¿s Magazine, Monthly Review, etc.)


4. Science writing (Newton, Locke, Hartley, Priestley, White, E. Darwin, Davy)


6. Literary Criticism (Dryden, Bysshe, Dennis, Johnson, Barbauld, Blair, Wordsworth)


7. Biography (Boswell, Johnson, Franklin, Southey)


8. Literature for and about Children (Isaac Watts, Defoe, Sarah Fielding, Newbery, Rousseau, Day, the Edgeworths, Wollstonecraft, the Taylors)


9. Eighteenth-Century Modes


1. Satire


2. Nationalism


3. The Amorous and the Erotic (pornographic?)


4. Pastoral, Georgian, Urban


5. Epistolary prose and verse


6. Realism and Romance


7. Sensibility, Gothic, Ludic
Part Two: Chronology



1. The "Long Eighteenth Century" I: Restoration (Dryden, Behn, Rochester, Congreve, Milton, Locke, Newton)


1. Satire on the page, Comedy on the stage
Text box: Dryden¿s Absalom and Achitophel


2. Aphra Behn and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester


3. Paradise Lost, epic and nationalism


4. Locke, Newton, and the Enlightenment


5. Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)


2. The First Half by Decade


1. 1701¿10


1. Concerns about succession and national identity: the Act of Settlement, the War of Spanish Succession, the Act of Union
Text box: the Duke of Marlborough and his detractors


2. The rise of women writers¿Finch, Egerton, Chudleigh, Centlivre, Manley


3. The Splendid Shilling and mock epic (Philips, Mandeville, Swift, and looking ahead to 1712 and Pope¿s Rape of the Lock)


4. The English stage after the Death of Dryden¿Rowe, Farquhar, Centlivre, Vanbrugh, Cibber


5. Defoe the journalist
Text box: Copyright Act


2. 1711¿20


1. Whigs and Tories


2. The Urban Pastoral (Gay, Pope, Swift, Montagu)


3. Pope and Criticism (Bysshe, Dennis, Ozell, Parnell)


4. Addison, Cato, a Tragedy


5. The South Sea Company and the crash


6. The Spectator and the future of journalism


7. Robinson Crusoe


3. 1721¿30


1. Robert Walpole


2. (related) Pope and Swift at their best
Text box: The Beggar¿s Opera


3. Gulliver¿s Travels


4. Fielding the playwright


5. Steele, The Conscious Lovers


6. Haywood¿s Love in Excess and Defoe¿s Moll Flanders


7. Nature and Place (Thomson, Seasons; Defoe, Tour; Dyer, Grongar Hill; Thomson; Duck)


4. 1731¿40


1. Bourgeois Tragedy: Lillo, The London Merchant


2. Virtue, Optimism: Pope, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson
Text box: Leibniz, Theodicy


3. Wesley¿s Conversion


4. Pope¿s familiar epistles (and Swift¿s Verses)


5. The Dunciad(s)


6. The Licensing Act and the English Stage


7. Hogarth¿s prints


5. Mid-century: the 1740s


1. The Pamela controversy and the English Novel: Richardson, Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Haywood, Smollett


2. Graveyard Poets and Gray¿s Elegy (1751)


3. Warton, Collins, Gray, Akenside, and the Ode
Text box: The Pleasures of the Imagination


4. David Hume


5. The Jacobite Uprising


6. The Wesleys and the seeds of Methodism


7. Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes


6. The Second Half by Decade


1. 1751¿60


1. Benjamin Franklin and the Colonial "Enlightenment"


2. Edmund Burke


3. Johnson¿s Dictionary, Rambler, and Idler


4. The Seven Years¿ War and the Expansion of Empire


5. Rasselas, Candide, and Tristram Shandy


6. Garrick and Churchill, The Rosciad


7. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments


2. 1761¿70


1. Shakespeare (Garrick¿s Jubilee, Johnson¿s edition)
Text box: Mozart in England


2. Macpherson, Percy¿s Reliques, and antiquarian poetry (looks ahead to Chatterton)


3. Gainsborough, Reynolds, and the Royal Academy


4. Feeling and Sentiment: Goldsmith, Sterne, Mackenzie


5. The Stamp Act and related issues in America


3. 1771¿80


1. Goldsmith, Sheridan, and "laughing comedy" vs. "sentimental comedy"
Text box: The School for Scandal


2. American Independence and its British Intellectual Heritage


3. Phillis Wheatley¿s poetry and Pope


4. Nations and Empires: Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon


5. Captain Cook¿s voyages (looks ahead to Joseph Banks)


6. Priestley and Oxygen
Text box: Barbauld¿s "The Mouse¿s Petition"


7. Gordon Riots: Catholics and Dissenters in 18th-century England


8. Fanny Burney, Evelina


4. 1781¿90


1. Slavery and Abolition (including Olney Hymns, Yearsley, More, Equiano)


2. Burke, Hastings, and India (also looks back to Foote¿s The Nabob and forward to Sheridan¿s Pizarro)
Text box: the Bounty mutiny


3. Crabbe, Yearsley, Burns and a new rural poetry (also looks back to Goldsmith¿s Deserted Village and forward to Lyrical Ballads)


4. Cowper, The Task


5. Rewriting Restoration Comedy: Sheridan and Hannah Cowley


6. Women poets and poetic form: Seward, Smith, Williams
Text box: Female Celebrities Sarah Siddons (actress), Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire


5. Fin de siècle: the 1790s


1. The Della Cruscans, Peter Pindar, and Serious Play


2. The Millennium and the End of the World (Priestley, Price, Coleridge)


3. Dissenters: Barbauld, "Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts" and Other Essays (to Wilberforce, on Wakefield)


4. The Revolution Debate (Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Godwin)


5. The Gothic (Radcliffe, Lewis, Brown, translations of Burger¿s ballads, looks back to Walpole¿s Castle of Otranto)


6. Early English Symbolists: Fuseli, Blake (with Goya, David; also Boydell¿s Shakespeare Gallery)


7. The Revolutionary Stage (Schiller, Inchbald, Holcroft, Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge)


8. Lyrical Ballads, Lyrical Tales, Metrical Tales (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robinson, Southey)
Text box: Coleridge¿s "Kubla Khan"


6. Conclusion: The "Long Eighteenth Century" II: Wordsworth, Austen


7. Glossary of Key Terms


8. Annotated Further Reading


9. Works Cited


10. Index

Product details

• Authors: Daniel Robinson
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 31.12.2022, delayed
• EAN: 9780415735124
• ISBN: 978-0-415-73512-4
• No. of pages: 304
• Series: Routledge Engagements with Literature
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies