The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650‐1740

Steven N. Zwicker indicates in his preface that the aim of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650‐1740 “is to introduce students to English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments”. The 14 essays in the volume “introduce the critical perspectives that shape our current work in literary criticism and cultural history even as they remind us of the aesthetic theories and literary practices of Augustan England, a world in which social relations and the life of the state were inextricably bound to the imagination of writers”. Zwicker provides two detailed chronologies. The first, “events...