Jonathan Swift's satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, has shocked and delighted readers worldwide since its publication in 1726. At turns a humorous and harrowing indictment of human behaviour, it has been endlessly reinterpreted by critics and adapted across media by other artists. The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels comprises 17 original chapters by leading scholars, written in a theoretically-informed but accessible style. As well as providing detailed close readings of each part of the narrative, this Companion relates Gulliver's Travels to the political, religious, scientific, colonial, and intellectual debates in which Swift was engaged, and it assesses the form of the book as a novel, travel book, philosophical treatise, and satire. Finally, it explores the Travels' rich and varied afterlives: the controversies it has fuelled, the films and artworks it has inspired, and the enduring need authors have felt to 'write back' to Swift's original, disturbing, and challenging story.

Why have scholars located the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England? What historical forces and stylistic developments helped to turn a disreputable type of writing into an eminent literary form?
This Reader's Guide explores the key critical debates and theories about the rising novel, from eighteenth-century assessments through to present day concerns. Nicholas Seager:

surveys major criticism on authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen
covers a range of critical approaches and topics including feminism, historicism, postcolonialism and print culture
demonstrates how critical work is interrelated, allowing readers to discern trends in the critical conversation.
Approachable and stimulating, this is an invaluable introduction for anyone studying the origins of the novel and the surrounding body of scholarship.

Jonathan Swift's satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, has shocked and delighted readers worldwide since its publication in 1726. At turns a humorous and harrowing indictment of human behaviour, it has been endlessly reinterpreted by critics and adapted across media by other artists. The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels comprises 17 original chapters by leading scholars, written in a theoretically-informed but accessible style. As well as providing detailed close readings of each part of the narrative, this Companion relates Gulliver's Travels to the political, religious, scientific, colonial, and intellectual debates in which Swift was engaged, and it assesses the form of the book as a novel, travel book, philosophical treatise, and satire. Finally, it explores the Travels' rich and varied afterlives: the controversies it has fuelled, the films and artworks it has inspired, and the enduring need authors have felt to 'write back' to Swift's original, disturbing, and challenging story.

This comprehensive and authoritative edition of the correspondence of Daniel Defoe situates each letter in its biographical, literary, and historical contexts. A unique source for a turbulent period of British history, Defoe's correspondence spans topics including the first age of party marked by Tory and Whig rivalry, religious tensions between the Church and Dissenters, the uncertainty of the monarchical succession, the birth of Great Britain and its establishment as a global empire, and the use of the press to mould public opinion. As well as an introduction discussing Defoe's epistolary habits and the distinctive features of his letters, headnotes and annotations explain each document's occasion, beginning in 1703 with Defoe hunted by the government for sedition, and ending in 1730 with him again in hiding, fleeing creditors months before his death. The volume is illustrated with examples of Defoe's letters, offering a fresh window onto Defoe's manuscript habits.

The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction probes the adaptation and appropriation of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known British and Irish novels in the long eighteenth century, from the period of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood through to that of Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Major authors, including Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, are discussed alongside writers such as Sarah Fielding and Ann Radcliffe, whose literary significance is now increasingly being recognised. By uncovering this neglected aspect of the reception of eighteenth-century fiction, this collection contributes to developing our understanding of the form of the early novel, its place in a broader culture of entertainment then and now, and its interactions with a host of other genres and media, including theatre, opera, poetry, print caricatures and film.

The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction probes the adaptation and appropriation of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known British and Irish novels in the long eighteenth century, from the period of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood through to that of Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Major authors, including Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, are discussed alongside writers such as Sarah Fielding and Ann Radcliffe, whose literary significance is now increasingly being recognised. By uncovering this neglected aspect of the reception of eighteenth-century fiction, this collection contributes to developing our understanding of the form of the early novel, its place in a broader culture of entertainment then and now, and its interactions with a host of other genres and media, including theatre, opera, poetry, print caricatures and film.

The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by an unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson, who would later become the most celebrated British writer of the late 1700s. Richard Savage (1697-1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane, charming, a brilliant conversationalist, but also irresponsible and impulsive. His role in a tavern brawl almost led him to the gallows, though his life was saved by an eleventh-hour pardon by the King. Over time he attracted many supporters, practically all of whom he managed to alienate by the time of his death in a debtors' prison in Bristol. Johnson, who had been friends with Savage for a little over a year, drew on published documents and his own memories of Savage to produce one of the first great English biographies. The edition is supplemented by other writings by Johnson, a selection of Savage's prose and verse, contemporary and posthumous responses to Savage and to Johnson's biography, and selections by Johnson's first two major biographers, John Hawkins and James Boswell. A discussion of factual errors in Johnson's account help the reader place the Life and the supplementary texts in their historical and intellectual contexts.

The cultural highlights of the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) have long been overlooked. However, recent scholarship, including the present volume, is demonstrating that Anne has been seriously underestimated, both as a person, and as a monarch, and that there was much cultural activity of note in what might be called an interim period, coming after the deaths of Dryden and Purcell but before the blossoming of Pope and Handel, after the glories of Baroque architecture but before the triumph of Burlingtonian neoclassicism. The authors of Queen Anne and the Arts make a case for Anne's reign as a time of experimentation and considerable accomplishment in new genres, some of which developed, some of which faded away. The volume includes essays on the music, drama, poetry, quasi-operas, political pamphlets, and architecture, as well as on newer genres, such as coin and medal collecting, hymns, and poetical miscellanies, all produced during Anne's reign.

With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager. This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen's manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship [sic], and The History of England.