Recent years have witnessed a growing fascination with the printed annotations accompanying eighteenth-century texts. Previous studies of annotation have revealed the margins as dynamic textual spaces both shaping and shaped by diverse aesthetic, historical, and political sensibilities. Yet previous studies have also been restricted to notes by or for canonical figures; they have neglected annotation's relation to developments in reading audiences and the book trade; and they have overlooked the interaction, even tension, between prose notes and poetry, a tension reflecting eighteenth-century views of poetry as aesthetically superior to prose. Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry addresses these oversights through a substantial introduction and eleven essays analyzing the printed endnotes and footnotes accompanying poems written or annotated between 1700 and 1830. Drawing on methods and critical developments in book history and print culture studies, this collection explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. By analyzing the annotation specific to poetry, these essays clarify the functions of notes among the other paratexts, including illustrations, by which scholars have mapped poetry's relation to the expanding book trade and the class-specific production of different formats. Because the reading and writing of poetry boasted social and pedagogical functions that predate the rise of the note as a print technology, studying the relation of notes to poetry also reveals how the evolving layout of the eighteenth-century book wrought significant changes not only on reading practices and reception, but on the techniques that booksellers used to make new poems, steady-sellers, and antiquarian discoveries legible to new readers. Above all, analyzing notes in poetry volumes contributes to larger inquiries into canon formation and the rise of literary studies as a discipline in the eighteenth century.

Recent years have witnessed a growing fascination with the printed annotations accompanying eighteenth-century texts. Previous studies of annotation have revealed the margins as dynamic textual spaces both shaping and shaped by diverse aesthetic, historical, and political sensibilities. Yet previous studies have also been restricted to notes by or for canonical figures; they have neglected annotation's relation to developments in reading audiences and the book trade; and they have overlooked the interaction, even tension, between prose notes and poetry, a tension reflecting eighteenth-century views of poetry as aesthetically superior to prose. Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry addresses these oversights through a substantial introduction and eleven essays analyzing the printed endnotes and footnotes accompanying poems written or annotated between 1700 and 1830. Drawing on methods and critical developments in book history and print culture studies, this collection explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. By analyzing the annotation specific to poetry, these essays clarify the functions of notes among the other paratexts, including illustrations, by which scholars have mapped poetry's relation to the expanding book trade and the class-specific production of different formats. Because the reading and writing of poetry boasted social and pedagogical functions that predate the rise of the note as a print technology, studying the relation of notes to poetry also reveals how the evolving layout of the eighteenth-century book wrought significant changes not only on reading practices and reception, but on the techniques that booksellers used to make new poems, steady-sellers, and antiquarian discoveries legible to new readers. Above all, analyzing notes in poetry volumes contributes to larger inquiries into canon formation and the rise of literary studies as a discipline in the eighteenth century.

This latest volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is the first fully annotated edition of Swift's Irish prose writings from 1726 to 1737. Works in this volume include the famous A Modest Proposal, the acerbic A Short View of the State of Ireland, Swift's contributions to The Intelligencer, and other prose pieces of satire, polemic and intervention into contemporary Irish politics. Most of these works have never previously been published with full scholarly annotation, or with a complete and textually authoritative apparatus. This volume offers a comprehensive introduction, setting Swift's writings of the period into their full historical, political and economic context. In addition to a critical introduction and appendices, there is also an up-to-date bibliography. The volume enables Swift's role as a political and social commentator in the years after the publication of Gulliver's Travels to be understood with new clarity.

Adam Rounce presents a colourful and unusual history of eighteenth-century British literature, exploring ideas of fame through writers who failed to achieve the literary success they so desired. Recounting the experiences of less canonical writers, including Richard Savage, Anna Seward and Percival Stockdale, Rounce discusses the inefficacy of apparent literary success, the forms of vanity and folly often found in failed authorship, and the changing perception of literary reputation from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the emergence of Romanticism. The book opens up new ways of thinking about the nature of literary success and failure, given the post-Romantic idea of the doomed creative genius, and provides an alternative narrative to critical accounts of the famous and successful.

During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its less celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation, critique, and contestation in ways that raise profound questions about the formation of moral identities and communities. Beyond Sense and Sensibility addresses those questions. What authority does reason retain as a moral faculty in an age of sensibility? How reliable or desirable is feeling as a moral guide or a test of character? How does such a focus contribute to moral isolation and elitism or, conversely, social connectedness and inclusion? How can we distinguish between that connectedness and a disciplinary socialization? How do insensible processes contribute to our moral formation and action? What alternatives lie beyond the anthropomorphism implied by sense and sensibility? Drawing extensively on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, this volume of essays examines moral formation represented in or implicitly produced by a range of texts, including Boswell's literary criticism, Fergusson's poetry, Burney's novels, Doddridge's biography, Smollett's novels, Charlotte Smith's children's books, Johnson's essays, Gibbon's history, and Wordsworth's poetry. The distinctive conceptual and textual breadth of Beyond Sense and Sensibility yields a rich reassessment and augmentation of the two perspectives summarized by the terms sense and sensibility in later eighteenth-century Britain.

This latest volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is the first fully annotated edition of Swift's Irish prose writings from 1726 to 1737. Works in this volume include the famous A Modest Proposal, the acerbic A Short View of the State of Ireland, Swift's contributions to The Intelligencer, and other prose pieces of satire, polemic and intervention into contemporary Irish politics. Most of these works have never previously been published with full scholarly annotation, or with a complete and textually authoritative apparatus. This volume offers a comprehensive introduction, setting Swift's writings of the period into their full historical, political and economic context. In addition to a critical introduction and appendices, there is also an up-to-date bibliography. The volume enables Swift's role as a political and social commentator in the years after the publication of Gulliver's Travels to be understood with new clarity.

This selection of poetry draws on different aspects of the poet's career to offer a comprehensive picture. It includes Churchill's most acclaimed and substantial poems, "The Prophecy of Famine," "An Epistle to William Hogarth," and "The Dedication to the Sermons."

Adam Rounce presents a colourful and unusual history of eighteenth-century British literature, exploring ideas of fame through writers who failed to achieve the literary success they so desired. Recounting the experiences of less canonical writers, including Richard Savage, Anna Seward and Percival Stockdale, Rounce discusses the inefficacy of apparent literary success, the forms of vanity and folly often found in failed authorship, and the changing perception of literary reputation from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the emergence of Romanticism. The book opens up new ways of thinking about the nature of literary success and failure, given the post-Romantic idea of the doomed creative genius, and provides an alternative narrative to critical accounts of the famous and successful.

Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds� of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersections of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Contributors take up other topics significant to the field, including post-feminism, travel, and seismology. Whether discussing cultural exchange or textual reciprocities, each piece extends the theme, building on the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings. Rounding out this collection are tributes from Clingham’s former students and colleagues, including original poetry.