Provides a rationale for current scholarly studies of Jonathan Swift. Reviews the two distinct directions taken by modern authors writing about Swift: the traditional historical branch and the rhetorical and literary criticism branch. Considers evidence of and reasons for a revived interest in satire and anticipates areas of future study. (DMM)

This annotated list of reading materials available to American children in 1776 includes both items published on this side of the Atlantic and works issued abroad and sold here as imports. The titles are divided into five categories: (1) primers and other instructional texts, (2) works intended for moral and religious instruction, (3) stories, (4)…

Describes a tour of the places of Jane Austen's novels that is offered by the Association for Cultural Exchange (ACE) in Cambridge, England. (JL)

This article examines America in terms of its influences on Chateaubriand, author of "Rene" and "Atala." (Text is in French.) (DB)

Notes that although women dominated the English world of letters in the late 1700s, eighteenth-century women writers have been ignored by literary scholars and historians. Asserts that this discrimination in favor of the canonized Romantics, such as Blake and Wordsworth, excludes women Romantics' valuable and lively literary contributions. (MM)

Explores how argumentation in the eighteenth-century miracles controversy (a century-long debate in Britain over the reasonableness of revealed religion) exhibited a controlling concern for procedural considerations. Discusses how the Deists and the Orthodox apologists used their argumentative force to advance rival methods for evaluating miracle…

Describes and analyzes Sauvigny's republican tragedy, "Vashington ou la liberte du Nouveau Monde" (Washington or New World Liberty), from literary and historical points of view. (DB)

Discusses William Beatty Warner's "Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation," a study of Samuel Richardson's role as eighteenth-century critic and interpreter of his own novels. Examines the treatment of character by both Richardson and Warner, focusing on Richardson's humanist interpretation and Warner's anti-humanist…

The first true English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey's "A Table Alphabeticall," published in 1604. Cawdrey's book may be seen as the result of a number of dramatic events that had occurred in the century and a quarter that preceeded it, including the widespread use of the Gutenberg press. Printing became so much easier and cheaper that…

This book is designed as an introduction to Christopher Smart's poetry for the general reader, the college student, and the college teacher. The political, social, and literary background of eighteenth-century England is examined in the first part of this volume. The second part concerns itself with Smart's life and the factors affecting his…

The theoretical and practical sides of Rousseau's conception of democracy as a new science of man are discussed. (DB)

The London Stage Information Bank (LSIB) is a machine-readable text of "The London Stage, 1660-1800," an 11-volume publication that contains information on plays, entertainments and afterpieces, casts, box-receipts, and contemporary comment compiled from playbills, newspapers, and theatrical diaries of the period. The LSIB can be…

Discusses the conflict between the religious and scientific imaginations as existing between the intellectual realms of unquestioning faith and constant questioning. Relates this conflict to writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, e.g., Bacon, Kepler, Wilkins, Godwin, Harrington, Campanella, Cyrano, Le Bret, Defoe, Swift, Voltiare,…