Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Based on close reading of a representative range of Defoe's writing, Borsing presents a study of Defoe's engagement with the concept of personal identity, exploring his construction of personae, his forays into different literary genres and the role of religion in his philosophy.

This book relocates the long life and literary career of the poet, playwright, novelist, philanthropist and teacher Hannah More (1745-1833) in the wider social and cultural contexts that shaped her, and which she helped shape in turn. One of the most influential writers and campaigners of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, More's reputation has suffered unfairly from accusations of paternalism and provincialism, and misunderstandings of her sincerely-held but now increasingly unfamiliar evangelical beliefs. Now, in this book, readers can explore a range of essays rooted in up-to-the-minute research which examines newly-recovered archival materials and other evidence in order to present the fullest picture yet of this complex and compelling author, and the era she helped mould with her words.

This book revisits heated discussions and adds new perspectives in light of growing awareness of Manley's contributions to 18th century literature. The methodological approaches incorporate traditional investigations, such as historical research, gender theory, and comparative close readings, as well as recently influential theories l

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends considerably the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment.

In this book, readers can explore a wide range of essays rooted in up-to-the-minute research examining the life, times and cultural contexts of the writer and philanthropist Hannah More (1745-1833). The book presents the fullest picture yet of this complex and compelling author, and the era she helped mould with her words.

Eliza Haywood¿s writing career spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. This book demonstrates how she contributed to making women¿s writing a locus of debate to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, and by current scholars of the eighteenth century.

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends considerably the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment.

Discusses the proper extent of women's participation in English public life during 1690s to the 1750s. This book reveals a critique of the early liberal public sphere being articulated by women writers who were keenly aware of the hierarchies and techniques of exclusion that contradicted their culture's appeals to the principles of equality.

This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century¿s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.

This study interprets eighteenth-century satire¿s famous typographical obsession as a fraught response to the Enlightenment¿s "ocularcentric" epistemological paradigms, as well as to a print-cultural moment identified by book-historians as increasingly "visual" ¿ a moment at which widespread attention was being paid, for the first time, to format, layout, and eye-catching advertising strategies. On the one hand, the Augustans were convinced of the ability of their elaborately printed texts to function as a kind of optical machinery rivaling that of the New Science, enhancing readers¿ physical but also moral vision. On the other hand, they feared that an overly scrutinizing gaze might undermine the viewer¿s natural faculty for candor and sympathy, delight and desire. In readings of Pope, Swift, and Montagu, Mannheimer shows how this distrust of the empirical gaze led to a reconsideration of the ethics, and most specifically the gender politics, of ocularcentrism. Whereas Montagu effected this reconsideration by directly satirizing both the eräs faith in the visual and its attendant publishing strategies, Pope and Swift pursued their critique via print itself: thus whether via facing-page translations, fictional editors, or disingenuous footnotes, these writers sought to ensure that typography never became either a mere tool of (or target for) the objectifying gaze, but rather that it remained a dynamic and interactive medium by which readers could learn both to see and to see themselves seeing.

Looking at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel, this work begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays.

Addressing the concepts of originality and intellectual property from perspectives bridging law, literature, visual arts, philosophy and history, this book offers interpretations of central issues in scholarship, examining how "originality" came to have different values and meanings.

In the second half of the eighteenth century the female reader was a frequent topic of cultural debate and moral concern. This book examines the variety of ways in which women 'read' the social world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel.

This book argues that the way the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel, a view that had been largely ignored in most accounts of the development of the novel.

An investigation into slavery in the work of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. These three writers were connected with a Tory ministry, which attempted to increase substantially the English share of the international slave trade. All three wrote in support of the treaty that was meant to effect that increase.