Table of Contents

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Preface; Part I. Contexts and Modes: 1. Readers, writers, critics, and the professionalization of literature Barbara M. Benedict; 2. Criticism, taste, aesthetics Simon Jarvis; 3. Literature and politics Michael Scrivener; 4. Literature, national identity, and empire Saree Makdisi; 5. Sensibility Susan Manning; 6. Theatrical culture Gillian Russell; 7. Gothic James Watt; Part II. Writers, Circles, Traditions: 8. Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding Peter Sabor; 9. Johnson, Boswell, and their circle Murray Pittock; 10. Sterne and Romantic autobiography Thomas Keymer; 11. Blake and the poetics of enthusiasm Jon Mee; 12. 'Unsex'd Females': Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith Judith Pascoe; 13. The Lake school: Wordsworth and Coleridge Paul Magnuson; 14. Jane Austen and the invention of the serious modern novel Kathryn Sutherland; 15. Keats, Shelley, Byron, and the Hunt circle Greg Kucich; 16. John Clare and the traditions of labouring-class verse John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan.

Promotional Information

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies.

About the Author

Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. His recent books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (paperback edition, 2004), and Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (with Peter Sabor, 2005). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830 (with Jon Mee, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (in progress), and co-general editor, with Peter Sabor, of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (in progress).

Reviews

'… this volume presents an illuminating collection of essays that will encourage students and academics to pursue new lines of enquiry.' Reference Reviews