Books in the Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought series

This highly original study identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart, and offers a powerful critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period.

Robert Mayer explores the meaning of 'history' in the seventeenth century and shows how the narratives of Daniel Defoe, unlike those of Aphra Behn, were read in their own time as history. Mayer's study makes an important contribution to the debate about the origins of the modern novel in Britain.

Edmond Malone (1741-1812) laid the foundations for the scholarly study of literature; yet he was also gregarious, attracting many friends and enemies among his contemporaries. This first modern full-length biography illuminates the private world of the scholar and the public world of the late eighteenth-century intellectual elite.

William Walker's original analysis of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding offers a challenging and provocative assessment of Locke's importance as a thinker, bridging the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussion of his work.

Marcus Walsh demonstrates that the work of pioneering editors of Milton and Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, was based on sophisticated and clearly articulated theories and methods. He relates these to contemporary interpretations of the Bible and key issues in modern editorial theory.

This study relates literary and political plots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the notion of sexual politics. From the restoration in 1660 to the rise of oligarchy in the 1720s, it traverses a wide range of authors and literary genres, including satire, tragedy, comedy, romance, georgic and the novel.