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From Restoration poets and playwrights Dryden, Rochester and Behn, through to the great eighteenth-century novelists and satirists Richardson, Burney and Defoe, this volume discusses the key literary developments of the age. Covering important topics of debate, such as trade, expansion and slavery, nature, liberty, and print culture, this York Notes Companion also incorporates relevant critical theory throughout for a complete and wide-ranging introduction.
List of contents
Part One: Introduction
Part Two: A cultural background
Part Three: Text, Writers and Contexts
Verse: John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Extended commentary: Wilmot, The Imperfect Enjoyment (1680)
Drama: Aphra Behn, William Congreve and Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Extended commentary: Behn, The Rover (1677-81)
Political and social satire: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Mary Wortley Montagu
Extended commentary: Pope: The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)
Pastoral/Anti-Pastoral Poetry: James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe and William Cowper
Extended commentary: Crabbe, The Village (1783)
The Novel, Part I: John Bunyan, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney
Extended commentary: Haywood, Fantomina (1725)
The Novel Part II: Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne
Extended commentary: Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67)
Part Four: Critical theories and debates
Man, Nature and Liberty
Gender and Sexuality
Trade, Colonial Expansion and Slavery
A Culture of Print
Part Five: References and resources
Timeline
Further reading
Index
About the author
Dr Penny Pritchard holds a BA from the University of Oxford and a Phd from the University of East Anglia. She has a wide range of post-16 teaching experience and is a lecturer in English Literature and Language at the University of Hertfordshire. Here she is the Module leader for the Eighteenth Century, and teaches on Restoration, Eighteenth Century and Renaissance modules. She has contributed an essay on Defoe's Nonconformist background and rhetoric to the forthcoming Cambridge Scholars volume Positioning Daniel Defoe's Non-fiction: Form, Genre and Function, and also a chapter on the funeral sermon to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the English Sermon.Penny has published extensive entries on Defoe's biography and literary works for various online directories, including the Literary Encyclopedia and the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. She is a member of BSECS and has chaired panels at their annual conference, as well as giving several seminar and conference papers here and at institutions round the country. She is also a member of the Defoe Society.
Summary
From Restoration poets and playwrights Dryden, Rochester and Behn, through to the great eighteenth-century novelists and satirists Richardson, Burney and Defoe, this volume discusses the key literary developments of the age. Covering important topics of debate, such as trade, expansion and slavery, nature, liberty, and print culture, this York Notes Companion also incorporates relevant critical theory throughout for a complete and wide-ranging introduction.
