Literary Studies / English Literature (18th century)

This book explores the tense relationship between opera and tragedy – often described as antithetical forms of theatre – from the 1630s to the 1780s.

The Smallpox Report explores the Romantic-era medical and literary narratives that made vaccination plausible, available, and desirable.

In Common Things explores the implacable agency of common substances in the life and literature of the Romantic period.

Media Critique in the Age of Gillray reflects on print and paper culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, crafting a new approach to British visual culture.

Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil explores literary representations of evil, pursuing the points of intersection between aesthetics and morality.

This book interrogates the enduring and controversial legend of Casanova, from a seducer of women to a man of science and key participant in the Enlightenment.

The Protestant Whore reveals the recurring connection between sexual impropriety and religious heterodoxy in Restoration thought, and Nell Gwyn, writ large as the nation's Protestant Whore, is shown to be a significant figure of sexual, political, and religious controversy.

Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment.

This study undertakes a new definition of the 18th-century novel’s investment in visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself.

Drawing on the theories of Kant and Lacan, this book reveals how modernity's characteristic stance produces an infinitely demanding ethics and a traumatic sublime.

Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.

Imagining Religious Toleration is a contributed volume that examines how literary modes were used to influence cultural understandings of tolerance and coexistence over the course of two hundred years.

Advocating a revised history of the eighteenth-century novel, Novel Cleopatras showcases the novel’s origins in ancient mythology, its relation to epic narrative, and its connection to neoclassical print culture.

Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends.

The Savage and Modern Self examines the representation of North American "Indians" in novels, poetry, plays, and material culture from eighteenth-century Britain.

Charlotte Lennox (c. 1729–1804) was an eighteenth-century English novelist whose most celebrated work, The Female Quixote (1752), is just one of eighteen works spanning a forty-three year career. Susan Carlile’s critical biography of Lennox focuses on her role as the central figure in the professionalization of authorship in England.