This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends, and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship, across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth century British culture.

This book is a major reassessment of the French Revolution's impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. Focusing particularly - but by no means exclusively - on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers. A team of international scholars study how English Romantic novelists sought to guide the British response to an event that seemed likely to turn the world upside down.

Counter-revolutionary or wary progressive? Critical apologist for the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties? What are the political and cultural significances of place when Scott represents the instabilities generated by the Union? Scott's Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place analyses Scott's sophisticated, counter-revolutionary interpretation of Britain's past and present in relation to those questions. Exploring the diversity within Scott's life and writings, as historian and political commentator, conservative committed to progress, Scotsman and Briton, lawyer and philosopher, this monograph focuses on how Scott portrays and analyses the evolution of the state through notions of place and landscape. It especially considers Scott's response to revolution and rebellion, and his geopolitical perspective on the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian sovereignty.