York Notes Companions: The Long 18th Century

Dr Penny Pritchard holds a BA from the University of Oxford and a Phd from the University of East Anglia. She has a wide range of post-16 teaching experience and is a lecturer in English Literature and Language at the University of Hertfordshire. Here she is the Module leader for the Eighteenth Century, and teaches on Restoration, Eighteenth Century and Renaissance modules. She has contributed an essay on Defoe’s Nonconformist background and rhetoric to the forthcoming Cambridge Scholars volume Positioning Daniel Defoe’s Non-fiction: Form, Genre and Function, and also a chapter on the funeral sermon to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the English Sermon.Penny has published extensive entries on Defoe’s biography and literary works for various online directories, including the Literary Encyclopedia and the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.  She is a member of BSECS and has chaired panels at their annual conference, as well as giving several seminar and conference papers here and at institutions round the country. She is also a member of the Defoe Society.

• Part One: Introduction  Part Two: A cultural background  Part Three: Text, Writers and ContextsVerse: John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester Extended commentary: Wilmot, The Imperfect Enjoyment (1680)Drama: Aphra Behn, William Congreve and Richard Brinsley Sheridan Extended commentary: Behn, The Rover (1677-81)Political and social satire: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Mary Wortley Montagu Extended commentary: Pope: The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)Pastoral/Anti-Pastoral Poetry: James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe and William CowperExtended commentary: Crabbe, The Village (1783)The Novel, Part I: John Bunyan, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney  Extended commentary: Haywood, Fantomina (1725)The Novel Part II: Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Laurence SterneExtended commentary: Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67)  Part Four:  Critical theories and debates  Man, Nature and LibertyGender and SexualityTrade, Colonial Expansion and SlaveryA Culture of Print  Part Five: References and resourcesTimelineFurther readingIndex

"Pearson’s guide to theLong 18th Century would be an extremely helpful resource to any student of A level to undergraduate level. It is a very easily readable guide to a century of dense social context; the book successfully manages to break this context down into easily comprehensible sections. One can easily dip in and out of the text; the subsections ensure that the writing is always focused and relevant and prevent one from getting lost in a mass of text. The style is academic, yet cogent and accessible and the index is thorough and comprehensive enough to make using the book very easy...The texts focused upon for the extended commentaries are well selected and overall it provides an essential guide to an era which can initially seem daunting in its range of innovations and heavily loaded political and social context."- Emily Scurrah, English Student, Warcwick University