Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. In The English Fable, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis describes the national obsession with Aesop's fables during this period as both a figural response to sociopolitical crises, and an antidote to emerging anxieties about authorship. Lewis traces the role that fable collections, Augustan fable theory, and debates about the figure of Aesop played in the formation of a modern, literate, and self-consciously English culture, and shows how three Augustan writers - John Dryden, Anne Finch, and John Gay - experimented with the seemingly marginal symbolic form of fable to gain access to new centres of English culture. Often interpreted as a discourse of the dispossessed, the fable in fact offered Augustan writers access to a unique form of cultural authority.

Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis decribes the explosion of interest in fable from its origins at the end of the English Civil Wars to its decline, and shows how three Augustan writers--John Dryden, Anne Finch and John Gay--experimented with fable as a literary form. Often underestimated because of its links with popular nonliterary forms, fable is shown to have played a major role in the formation of the modern English culture.

In "Air's Appearance", Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. "Air's Appearance" links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth's atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era's theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners - or, as they are now known, "airs". Lewis thus offers a striking new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment - the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel - that considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works like "Paradise Lost", "The Rape of the Lock", "Robinson Crusoe", and "The Mysteries of Udolpho", this book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.

Religion in Enlightenment England introduces its readers to a rich array of BritishChristian texts published between 1660 and 1750. The anthology documents the arc of Christian writings from the reestablishment of the Church of England to the rise of the Methodist movement in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment era witnessed the explosion ofmass print culture and the unprecedented expansion of literacy across society. These changes transformed many inherited Christian genresasuch as the sermon and the devotional manualawhile also generating new ones, from the modern church hymn to spiritual autobiography. The authors included in this collection confronted the rise of modern science and forged new rules of modern toleration.Their writing reveals the unprecedented spiritual authority assumed by women and helps explain how emotion moved to the center of religious experience. Religion in Enlightenment England captures the literary energy and excitement unleashed by the Enlightenment itself: authorsengageone another in spirited dialogue that pits reason against revelation, religious conformity against dissent, innovation against tradition, andFreethinking against natural religion. An indispensable asset for any scholar's library, the anthology includes texts by William Law, John Bunyan, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, John and Charles Wesley, Richard Baxter, John Toland, Mary Astell, Daniel Defoe, John Norris, Margaret Fell Fox, Isaac Watts, Thomas Traherne, John Tillotson, William Penn, and Anne Conway.