The Long 18th Century

This book looks at a range of writers including Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Richardson and Jonathan Swift. By combining fresh readings of familiar and unfamiliar texts with a new enquiry into the relationship between writers and their world, it provides a thorough and wide-ranging account of an energetic and troubled age.

The books in the Contexts series provide broad-ranging and accessible information about the literary, historical and cultural background of the major periods and genres, Taking its instigation from the ways in which literary texts define their own area of reference within their historical moment, each volume also questions canonical readings of its period, and contains relevant extracts from contemporary documents to aid further discussion.