British Literature 1640-1789

An indispensable reference for scholars and students of eighteenth-century English literature 

This addition to the celebrated Wiley-Blackwell Keywords series explores the meanings of fifty-eight of the most important words in British literature of the period 1640-1789. Professor DeMaria focuses on words used with frequency and urgency throughout the works of most major and several minor writers of the British Neoclassical era, with the occasional reach back to the early seventeenth century for a definitive usage found in Francis Bacon, for instance, and look forward to the nineteenth century to the works of Wordsworth, Austen, and Keats. Through discussions of words such as atom, economy, humanity, labor, machine, slavery, society, and system he reveals underlying assumptions about the way writers of the period thought about the physical and social world. Likewise, considerations of words such as happiness, passion, truth, and virtue shed light on the ethical and moral commitments of the age. Unlike dictionaries and many big-data semantics projects, this book brings forth the ambiguities, nuances, and ironies that accrued to word usages during the period through a heightened awareness of the contexts in which they occurred.

• Highlights and exposes the salient cultural and literary debates and metamorphic moments of cultural thought
• Reveals an increase in irony and a decrease in allegorical usage as an important trend in the evolution of literary language during the Neoclassical period
• Stresses the contexts within which words or phrases appear in order to offer a fuller understanding of their meanings and significance than available from digital databases
• Draws upon a vast compilation of sources from one of the most transformative eras of English literature

Rigorous in its scholarship and historical reach, British Literature 1640-1789: Keywords is an indispensable resource which scholars and students of British Neoclassical literature will want to keep close at hand. It is certain to become a fixture of most university reference libraries.