Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment

Kevin L. Cope is the Robert and Rita Wetta Adams Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

• Introduction: A Place for Genius: Howard Weinbrot and Eighteenth-Century StudiesKevin L. CopePart One: Poised on a Plinth or Perched on a Precipice?: Major AuthorsChapter One: Swift's ListsJ. T. Scanlan Chapter Two: History, Myth, and Heroism in Dryden's Translation, The ÆneisDavid VenturoChapter Three: Discourses of the Eye: Romeo and Juliet and William Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-ModeTimothy ErwinPart Two: Lives: Actual, Engrossed, or OtherwiseChapter Four: Samuel Johnson's Lives of the PhilosophersRobert DeMaria, Jr.Chapter Five: Imitation and Biography: Richard Savage and the Misreading of LondonLance WilcoxChapter Six: Johnson's Irascibles and the Good Work of Bad StoriesDavid Wade NunneryChapter Seven: Johnson, Dodd, and the Concentrated SententiaA. W. LeePart Three: Turbulent Times and Edgy Eternity: Conceiving, Building, and Revising the EnlightenmentChapter Eight: ‘Incipit’: Pope's Beginnings, Original and RevisedStephen KarianChapter Nine: Major, Minor, Marginal, Mummified: The Lost Middle Years of Eighteenth-Century Canon Formation in the Twentieth CenturyJames EngellChapter Ten: ‘Sublunary Particularity’: Religion, Rhetoric, and DifferenceSamara Anne CahillChapter Eleven: Stewards of the Lord: Eighteenth-Century Gardeners as Pioneers of SustainabilityBärbel CzenniaPart Four: Identity, British or Personal: Finding Oneself in the Long Eighteenth CenturyChapter Twelve: Diplomacy, Diversion, and Invention: Sir George Macartney at the Court of Catherine the GreatGreg ClinghamChapter Thirteen: Johnson and Stendhal: A French ConnectionPhilip SmallwoodChapter Fourteen: Samuel Johnson and the Sense of PlaceStephen ClarkeChapter Fifteen: Some Dreams in Eighteenth-Century FictionMaximillian E. Novak

This abundant collection of essays makes a significant contribution to eighteenth-century studies by exploring both the works of major authors and other diverse and fascinating topics including canon formation, horticultural practice, and English perceptions of the Russian court. Many of the essays within it are as tenaciously detailed and thorough as the scholarship of Howard Weinbrot himself, and the whole a fitting tribute to his powerful and capacious mind.