A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is a lively exploration of one of the most diverse and innovative periods in literary history.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Verse in the Early Eighteenth Century, I
• I. Alexander Pope
• II. John Gay
• III. Swift the Poet
• Verse in the Early Eighteenth Century, II
• I. Matthew Prior and Joseph Addison
• II. Daniel Defoe, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Thomson
• English Verse, III: Mid‐Century Onwards
• I. Johnson, Gray, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Collins, Smart, Watts
• II. Goldsmith, Churchill, Cowper
• Eighteenth‐Century Verse, IV
• Prose Fiction in the Early Eighteenth Century
• I. Predecessors: Behn and Haywood
• II. Defoe and Prose Fiction
• III. Swift and Gulliver's Travels
• Prose Fiction in the Mid‐Eighteenth Century
• I. Richardson
• II. Fielding
• III. Smollett
• The Novel Past Mid‐Century: New Directions and Experiments
• I. Johnson and Sterne
• II. Mackenzie and Walpole
• III. Goldsmith and Burney
• Non‐Fictional Prose, I
• I. An Age of Prose: Familiar Letters: Pope, Swift, Johnson, Walpole
• II. James Boswell and Edward Gibbon
• III. Social and Moral Prose: The Periodical Essay
• IV. Literary Criticism
• Non‐Fictional Prose, II
• I. Defoe and Swift
• II. Burke, Johnson, Hume
• Eighteenth‐Century Drama
• I. Restoration Re‐establishment of the English Theater
• II. Eighteenth‐Century Tragedy
• III. Comic Drama in the Eighteenth Century