EBRO Review Archives

In his groundbreaking article “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class,” E. P. Thompson cites a letter from John Gay as an example of the critique of high government by analogy to low culture: “I know that if one would be agreeable to men of dignity, one must study to imitate them, and I know which way they get Money and places.

In The Luxury of Skepticism, Timothy Dykstal charts the history of political dialogue in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England, exploring how a typically philosophical form comes to serve the purposes of modern political debate.

While during the Reformation period, and then again during the English Civil Wars, freedom of the press was de facto in existence because the publishing of newspapers, libels and books could not be controlled efficiently by the authorities, theories both about freedom of expression and about freedom of the press developed only later.

Louis XIV’s chapel at the palace of Versailles was finished, after twenty-eight years in the making, in 1710. The visitor to the chapel, then as now, would be confronted by an overwhelming profusion of decoration on the interior: illusionistic painting, marble marquetry, relief sculpture and a magnificent altar and organ.

Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator (1744-46) is celebrated as the first journal written for women by a woman. Until recently, it has been available only in Mary Priestley's quaint and quirky 1929 collection and Gabrielle Firmager's 1993 slim but scholarly selection of tales.

Widows have been a source of tension in English literature at least since the Wife of Bath challenged “auctoritee” with her own “experience”[i]; in this pioneering work on widows in the eighteenth-century novel, Karen Bloom Gevirtz argues that this tension regarding widows’ experience is heightened in the fiction of the period.

Betsy Bolton's Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage examines politics during the early Romantic period as an arena of performance complementary to the performance of gender.

While Bath is the titular focus of this study, the author's over-arching concern appears to be "the way that the past is constructed and images of it created … a response … to the practical activity of making history" (1).

When the London Journal first appeared in 1950, it created the biggest publishing event of the season. No work of eighteenth-century literature has made such an impact on the broad reading public over recent years. Hardly anyone active in the field can now remember this sensational premiere, and today we might find it difficult to recapture those feelings.

“What happened in Britain when the East India Company became an imperial power in India?” (x).  H. V. Bowen sets out to answer this question in his new book.

The revolutionary fervor that forged America began as a movement of bold ideas in print—long before shots were fired at Lexington or at Concord. Those were certainly the convictions of the people who lived then and wrote about it.

With last year's congratulatory essays and volumes in honor of Goethe's birthday at a peak, the sardonic remark a highly esteemed colleague once made comes to mind.