Product Description: Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire immediately captured the attention of a wide readership and has remained popular ever since. However, it is also an extremely complex work, published in multiple volumes, which covers a enormous range of topics and drew on a variety of sources and historiographic traditions...read more

Product Description: In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, when Great Britain was suffering a series of military reversals, Montagu considered his country’s plight in an historical context formed by the study of five ancient republics: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome...read more

Product Description: A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings brings together the principal writings on religious toleration and freedom of expression by one of the greatest philosophers in the Anglophone tradition: John Locke. The son of Puritans, Locke (1632–1704) became an Oxford academic, a physician, and, through the patronage of the Earl of Shaftesbury, secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina...read more

David Womersley's book investigates Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work's transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally discarded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emerges from this study as a work more flexible in its sympathies and surprising in its judgements than has hitherto been granted, while the magnitude of Gibbon's achievement as a stylist, historian and thinker is brought into sharper focus.

In the wake of the formalist 'New Critical' consensus of the mid-twentieth century, a central and recurrent problem in the field of literary study has been that of precisely how the literary text was to be related to the various and proliferating contexts that now jostled for critical attention. The quality of balanced judgment was suddenly especially valuable. These essays range over the fields of Erskine-Hill's own scholarship, from Shakespeare and early modern literature to Wordsworth, evincing in their own procedures and discriminations the influence of his own example: scrupulous care over the handling of evidence, an interdisciplinary impulse yoked always to a prizing of the literary (particularly of the poetic), a willingness to embrace an ambitious argument where it can be supported, a humaneness of temper, particularly in polemic. Latent within them all is a wrestling with that central problem of text and context that preoccupied Erskine-Hill throughout his career, and which is still the dominant issue in literary studies.

Product Description: American Founding and Constitution

In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope noted that his age was one of "Parties, both in Wit and State." Much scholarship has been devoted to the complexities of the political parties of the eighteenth century, but there has been a surprising reluctance to explore what Pope implied were the corollaries of those parties, namely, parties in literature. The essays collected here explore the literary culture that arose from and supported what Pitt the Elder referred to as the "great spirit of Whiggism" that animated English politics during the eighteenth century. From the prehistory of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the French Revolution in the 1790s, the interactions between Whiggish politics and literature are sampled and described in groundbreaking essays that range widely across the fields of eighteenth-century political prose, poetry, and the novel.

Product Description: This volume contains a generous selection from the essays Johnson published twice weekly as "The Rambler" in the early 1750s. It was here that he first created the literary character and forged the distinctive prose style that established him as a public figure...read more

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Product Description: This new anthology provides seventeen key plays by twelve dramatists of the Restoration period in an anthology designed specifically for course use, with annotations and judiciously modernized texts. It offers a representative sampling of the types of play of the period, including plays by both men and women - sex comedy, moral comedy, heroic drama, Shakespearean adaptation and political history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: . 2004 clean bright copy (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Covering the period 1660-1770, this book includes the major texts by Dryden, Pope and Johnson on the act and art of poetry, as well as less finished reflections and critical essays by a wide variety of other practitioners. The anthology also reflects on the art of fiction. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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