The Secret History in Literature, 1660-1820

Rebecca Bullard is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (2009) and editor of The Fair Penitent and The Ambitious Step-Mother for The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, Volume 1 (2016). Rachel Carnell is a Professor of English at Cleveland State University, Ohio. Professor Carnell is the author of Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism and the Rise of the British Novel (2006), A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (2008), and co-editor of the five-volume Selected Works of Delarivier Manley (with Ruth Herman, 2005). She has also had several research articles published on subjects such as secret history, Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson and Eliza Haywood.

• Introduction: reconsidering secret history Rebecca Bullard; Part I. Seventeenth-Century England: 1. Paradise Lost as a secret history Michael McKeon; 2. Secret history and seventeenth-century historiography Martine W. Brownley; 3. Secret history and restoration drama Erin Keating; 4. Secret history and allegory David A. Brewer; 5. Secret history and amatory fiction Claudine van Hensbergen; 6. Secret history and spy narratives Slaney Chadwick Ross; Part II. Eighteenth-Century Britain: 7. Secret history, parody, and satire Melinda Alliker Rabb; 8. Secret history and it-narrative Rivka Swenson; 9. Secret history, oriental tale, and fairy tale Ros Ballaster; 10. Secret history and the periodical Nicola Parsons; 11. Secret history and censorship Eve Tavor Bannet; 12. Secret history and anecdote April London; 13. Secret history in the Romantic period Miranda Burgess; Part III. France and America: 14. Secret history in pre-revolutionary France Allison Stedman; 15. Secret history in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France Antoinette Sol; 16. Secret history in British North America and the early Republic Kevin Joel Berland; 17. Secret history in the early nineteenth-century Americas Gretchen J. Woertendyke; Epilogue: secret history at the start of the twenty-first century Rachel Carnell.

'While it might be an exaggeration to say that there are two distinct histories of the secret history, there seem to be at least two styles of writing about it. The first is literary, and this tradition is best exemplified by Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's remarkably wide-ranging and insightful collection of essays, The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820.' Brian Cowan, Huntington Library Quarterly