Dr Penny Pritchard holds a BA from the University of Oxford and a Phd from the University of East Anglia. She has a wide range of post-16 teaching experience and is a lecturer in English Literature and Language at the University of Hertfordshire. Here she is the Module leader for the Eighteenth Century, and teaches on Restoration, Eighteenth Century and Renaissance modules. She has contributed an essay on Defoe's Nonconformist background and rhetoric to the forthcoming Cambridge Scholars volume Positioning Daniel Defoe's Non-fiction: Form, Genre and Function, and also a chapter on the funeral sermon to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the English [...] has published extensive entries on Defoe's biography and literary works for various online directories, including the Literary Encyclopedia and the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. She is a member of BSECS and has chaired panels at their annual conference, as well as giving several seminar and conference papers here and at institutions round the country. She is also a member of the Defoe Society.

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: A cultural background

Part Three: Text, Writers and Contexts

Verse: John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Extended commentary: Wilmot, The Imperfect Enjoyment (1680)

Drama: Aphra Behn, William Congreve and Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Extended commentary: Behn, The Rover (1677-81)

Political and social satire: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Mary Wortley Montagu

Extended commentary: Pope: The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)

Pastoral/Anti-Pastoral Poetry: James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe and William Cowper

Extended commentary: Crabbe, The Village (1783)

The Novel, Part I: John Bunyan, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney

Extended commentary: Haywood, Fantomina (1725)

The Novel Part II: Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne

Extended commentary: Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67)

Part Four: Critical theories and debates

Man, Nature and Liberty

Gender and Sexuality

Trade, Colonial Expansion and Slavery

A Culture of Print

Part Five: References and resources

Timeline

Further reading

Index