Robert DeMaria Jr is Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology in Blackwell's Anthologies series and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1993) in Blackwell's Critical Biography series, and of several other books, including Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986).

"[This anthology] of critical essays makes a welcome addition to the scholarship and teaching of that historical span of English literary history often awkwardly referred to as 'the long eighteenth century."Notes and Queries

• Acknowledgements. A Note on the Form of Reference.1. Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere: David Norbrook.2. From 'Milton and the Fit Reader', Sharon Achinstein.3. 'The Balance of Power in Marvell's "Horatian Ode"': Thomas M. Greene.4. 'Oroonoko's Blackness': Catherine Gallagher.5. 'Lordly Accents: Rochester's Satire' (1994): Claude Rawson.6. From Brittania's Issue, 'Dryden's "Anne Killigrew": Towards a New Pindaric Political Ode": Howard Weinbrot.7. Ironic Monologue and 'Scandalous Ambro-dexter Conformity'" in Defoe's The Shortest Way with the Dissenters": D. N. DeLuna.8. 'Strange Complicities: Atheism and Conspiracy in A Tale of a Tub': Roger Lund.9. From Resemblance and Disgrace, 'The Rape of the Lock as Miniature Epic': Helen Deutsch.10. From English Women's Poetry 1649-1714, 'Anne Finch: Gender, Politics, and Myths of the Self': Carol Barash.11. 'The Spirit of Ending in Johnson and Hume': Adam Potkay.12. From The Muses of Resistance, 'An English Sappho Brilliant, Young and Dead?' Mary Leapor Laughs at the Fathers': Donna Landry.13. O Lachrymarum Fons: Thomas Gray's Sensibility: George E. Haggerty.14. 'The Culture of Travesty: Sexuality and Masquerade in Eighteenth-Century England': Terry Castle.15. From The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke, 'Theater and Counter-Theater in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France': Frans De Bruyn.16. Cowper's Hares: David Perkins.17. Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England: Ruth Perry.18. Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton: Claude Rawson.Bibliography.Index.