Gulliver's Travels by 
John Milton by
Bloom calls Milton the greatest poet of the 17th century and the most powerful in the language after Shakespeare and Chaucer. Examined are "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas," "Samson Agonistes," as well as "Sonnet 18," "Sonnet 19," and "Sonnet 23."
History and the Early English Novel by
This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only 'history' in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and marvels. Mayer thus explains why Defoe's narratives were initially read as history. It is the acceptance of the claims to historicity, the study argues, that differentiates Defoe's fictions from those of writers like Thomas Deloney and Aphra Behn, important writers who nevertheless have figured less prominently than Defoe in discussions of the novel. Mayer ends by exploring the theoretical implications of the history-fiction connection. His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.
The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by
Substantially enlarged and updated for this new edition, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the definitive guide to the vast and extraordinarily rich heritage of literature written in English. It covers all the major novelists, poets and dramatists - from Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens to Conrad and to contemporary writers from all over the English-speaking world - Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, Les Murray, Wole Soyinka, and Janet Frame.
Reforging Shakespeare by
Reforging Shakespeare charts the bizarre but true story of William-Henry Ireland, a seventeen-year-old boy who, in 1795, fooled the academic and theatrical world with his Shakespeare forgeries. The book not only covers the story of the fraud, but details concerns about eighteenth-century aesthetics, literary fraud and detection, and, of course, perceptions of Shakespeare. It offers an explanation as to the conditions that gave rise to the forgery as well as its major ramifications, which are still affecting Shakespeare scholarship and theatrical production.
Dryden in Revolutionary England by
In 1681, when he wroteAbsalom and Achitophel, John Dryden was poet laureate and historiographer royal at the court of his patron Charles II, and the acknowledged champion of a successful political cause. Only a few years later, Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism, followed by James II's deposition for favoring Catholics, had cost the poet both his honors and his public. In no way, however, did Dryden accept the status of a political has-been. David Bywaters argues convincingly that this post-revolutionary phase of Dryden's career reveals a polemic as consistent as that of earlier periods.
