Essays and Articles on Restoration and 18th-century English Literature.

These essays are not intended to replace library research. They are here to show you what others think about a given subject, and to perhaps spark an interest or an idea in you. To take one of these essays, copy it, and to pass it off as your own is known as plagiarism—academic dishonesty which will result (in every university I've heard tell of) in suspension or dismissal from the university. Not only are your professors as technology savvy as you are, they will not tolerate theft of another's intellectual efforts.

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John Dryden =Student Essay
See Dryden Essay Page



Samuel Butler =Student Essay
Samuel Butler And 'Hudibras' - Ian Jack
On the Hero of Hudibras; Butler Vindicated - Isaac D'Israeli



Samuel Pepys =Student Essay
Samuel Pepys - Robert Louis Stevenson
Samuel Pepys and His Cookbooks - Roy Schreiber
The Diary Network in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England - Elaine McKay
An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys - Clara Claiborne Park



John Bunyan =Student Essay
Trope and Truth in The Pilgrim's Progress - Brenda Machosky
The Sign of the Cross in John Bunyan's Grace Abounding - Peter Goldman
John Bunyan - Andrew Lang
Pilgrim's Progress: A Review - George Latham
Christian Allegory in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparison of George Herbert and John Bunyan - Rebecca Branham Dimon
The conflicted Puritan inheritance of John Bunyan's political writings - Galen K. Johnson
The Place of Despair and Hope - Angus Fletcher
The Pilgrim's Progress: A Dream That Endures - James F. Forrest
Fearful Allegories: Bunyan's Vision of the Christian Life - Nathan Vonnahme
An Introduction to John Bunyan’s The House of the Forest of Lebanon - Sarah Hale
The Author and His Reader: Christian Literature as Conversation - Heather-Ann Wickers
John Bunyan's The Heavenly Footman - Lawrence Bilkes
John Bunyan's The Strait Gate: Rightly Handling the Master's Metaphor - Rob Barrett
John Bunyan's One Thing is Needful - Jennifer Cuthbertson
The Water of Life - Donna McDowell
The Significance and Success of Allegory and Dreams in The Pilgrim's Progress - Anon. Student at University of York



Aphra Behn =Student Essay
See Aphra Behn Essay Page



Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea =Student Essay
Staying out late: Anne Finch's poetics of evening - Christopher R. Miller
Anne Finch as a Translator - Ellen Moody
Anne Finch and Lady Mary Montagu: Sister Poets - Ellen Moody
"I hate such parts as we have plaid today" - Ellen Moody
The Elephant as Disgruntled Literary Critic and An Elephant Fretting to No Purpose - Ellen Moody
Anne Finch Surveys Womankind - Joyce Cornette Palmer



Matthew Prior =Student Essay
The Jacobite Poets of Richmond - Donald Bruce
"The most fatal of all faults": Samuel Johnson on
        Prior's Solomon and the need for variety - Matthew M. Davis



Daniel Defoe =Student Essay
Women, Work, Rearguard Politics, and Defoe's Moll Flanders - Melissa Mowry
At Home in England, or Projecting Liberal Citizenship in Moll Flanders - Amit Yahav-Brown
Defoe's Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in Moll Flanders - S. Swaminathan
Defoe's 'Almost Invisible Hand': Narrative Logic as a Structuring Principle in Moll Flanders - Carl R. Lovitt
Moll Flanders: The Felon as Lawyer - Beth Swan
Moll Flanders and English Marriage Law - Melissa J. Ganz
Crusoe in the Cave: Defoe and the Semiotics of Desire - Geoffrey M. Sill
The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal and Sign in Robinson Crusoe - Dianne Armstrong
How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe - Christopher F. Loar
Narrative Contraries as Signs in Defoe's Fiction - Robert James Merrett
Real and Imaginary Stories: Robinson Crusoe and the Serious Reflections - Jeffrey Hopes
Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe - Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean
The Significant Gift in Eighteenth Century English Literature - J. Goellner
Defoe and the London Wall: Mapped Perspectives - Edward Copeland
The 'Lost' Continuation of Defoe's Roxana - P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens
Objects, Imaginings, and Facts: Going beyond Genre in Behn and Defoe - G. Gabrielle Starr
Defoe and Francis Noble - P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens
The Dialectics of Inside and Outside: Dominated and Appropriated Space in Defoe's Historical Fictions - George A. Drake
Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe - J. Paul Hunter
The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier - Sharon Alker
Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe - Maximillian E. Novak
A Sermon by the "Queen of Whores" - Marilyn Westfall
Reading and Righting Moll Flanders - Thomas Grant Olsen
"I wou'd be a Man-Woman": Roxana's Amazonian threat to the ideology of marriage - Shawn Lisa Maurer
"Roxana": The 1740 Version - Robert J. Griffin
The Institution of the English Novel: Defoe's Contribution - Homer Brown
At home in England; or, projecting liberal citizenship in Moll Flanders - Amit Yahav-Brown
Commercial Paper, Commercial Fiction: The Compleat English Tradesman and Defoe's Reluctant Novels - S. Sherman
Robinson Crusoe in Hollywood - Walter Coppedge
Bunyan, Defoe, and the Novel - Peter J. Leithart
Robinson Crusoe: An Evolution of Political Religion - Sean Cox
Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Defoe's "Shortest-Way" - Bruce Seaton
How Property and Ownership lead to Moral Economy in Defoe's
              Robinson Crusoe and Locke's Second Treatise of Government - Sarah Jacobson
Religion and Economics: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and
              Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Meghan Harrigan
Shame on You: Defoe and Locke - Tripp Cook
Property According to John Locke and Daniel Defoe - Larisa Otto
Locke and Defoe on Property - Jenny Poppert



Jonathan Swift =Student Essay
Thesis Swift as Christian Satirist - J. S. Porter
Thesis The Shifting Persona in Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub - Harriette Wallace
Society Cannot Be Flat: Hierarchy and Power in Gulliver's Travels - Monica F. Jacobe
Splenetic ogres and heroic cannibals in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal - Ahsan Chowdhury
The Will to Madness: Pride and the Meaning of Gulliver's Madness - J. Goellner
Jonathan Swift: Exile from Emotion - J. Goellner
Jonathan Swift Contra John Dunton - J. Goellner
Swift on false witness - Jeanne Clegg
Reading the Material Text of Swift's "Verses on the Death" - Stephen Karian
The Revolutionary Role of Venus Athena and Other Goddesses in "Cadenus and Vanessa" - Suzanne Poor
Dryden, Pope, and Swift: Intimacy and Eclecticism - Ian McKillop
Swift and the Idea of the Primitive Church - Anne Barbeau Gardiner
Public Certainty, Private Doubt: Swift in and out of the Pulpit - Michael DePorte
The Dean and the Dissenters - Ruth A. Herman
On Jonathan Swift's 'On the Day of Judgement' - W. J. McCormack
The Satirist and his Faith: an Overview - Brean S.Hammond
Swift and Sin - Dr Robert Mahony
'Hand in hand to posterity'? Reading politics in Swift and Pope - Valerie Rumbold
The 'Radical' Swift: The Fullback's Dilemma - Christopher J. Fauske
Swift, The Wild Boy of Hanover, and Queen Caroline - Christine Gerrard
Swift's Thoughts on Religion - Denis Donoghue
The Politics of A Modest Proposal - Ian Higgins
Swift and the Physicians: Aspects of Satire and Status - C. T. Probyn
Satire out of Time - Philip Hensher
Swift and Kafka - Jeffrey Meyers
Comparison of Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and Pope's "Rape of the Lock" - Susan Siferd
Jonathan Swift's Satire and Irony - Elena Taralunga Tamura [.pdf]
Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Defoe's "Shortest-Way" - Bruce Seaton
Some Thoughts Concerning Satire: An Exploration of Lockean Philosophy in Gulliver's Travels - Lauren Jarecki



William Congreve =Student Essay
Explication of Congreve's The Way of the World - R. T. Davis
Wit, Propriety, and Style in The Way of the World - Charles H. Hinnant
Discourse and Power in The Way of the World - Richard W. F. Kroll
Congreve's Way of the World and Popular Criminal Literature - John E. Loftis
The Indigestion of Widdow-hood: Blood, Jonson, and The Way of the World - James E. Neufeld
Capital Relations and The Way of the World - Richard Braverman
Language and Action in The Way of the World, Love's Last Shift, and The Relapse - Alan Roper
"This thing was only designed for show and form": The Vicissitudes of Resemblance in Congreve's Incognita - Aspasia Velissariou
Odes of Absorption in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century - Margaret Koehler
A "Double Portion of his Father's Art": Congreve, Dryden, Jonson and the drama of theatrical succession - Harold Weber
Congreve's Incognita: Romance, Novel, Drama? - Kristiaan P. Aercke
Congreve und Molière: Literar-Historische Untersuchung (1890) - Alexander Bennewitz



John Gay =Student Essay
'An Irregular Dog': Gay's Alternative Theatre - Peter Lewis
The Beggar's Opera and its Criminal Law Context - Ian Gallacher
Three Stories of Celebrity: The Beggar's Opera "Biographies" - Cheryl Wanko
The Music of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera - Jeremy Barlow
Handelian Opera in England - Roy Lisker
An Overview of The Beggar's Opera - Chris VanHorn
Music in The Beggar's Opera - Bareket, Eisendrath, & Selig
Class and Gender in The Beggar's Opera - Ana Hartman



Mary Astell =Student Essay
Book: Mary Astell (1916) - Florence M. Smith
Mary Astell and Metaphysics - Alice Sowaal
Eden Revisited: Re-visions of the Garden in Astell's Serious Proposal,
        Scott's Millenium Hall, and Graffigny's Lettres d'une péruvienne - J. David Macey Jr
Mary Astell: A Brush with Spinoza - Sarah Ellenzweig
De l'invisibilité du genre dans la théorie politique. Le débat Locke/Astell - E. Pisier & E. Varikas [.pdf]
Mary Astell: Christian Feminist - Margret Taube
Marriage in Astell and Montagu - Jennifer Thompson



Joseph Addison =Student Essay
Social and Literary Form in the Spectator - Scott Black
Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere - Brian Cowan
Ideology and Addison's Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination - William Walker
Cato's Ghosts: Pope, Addison, and Opposition Cultural Politics - Jorge Bastos da Silva
Book: Macaulay's Essay on Addison - Google Books
From Stage to Folk: A Note on the Passages from Addison's Rosamond in the "Truro" Mummers' Play - Tom Pettitt
Juba's Roman Soul: Addison's Cato and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism - Laura J. Rosenthal
Defining the Rake and Identifying His Demise in Addison and Steele's Spectator and Tattler - Theresa Hemsoth



Sir Richard Steele =Student Essay
Social and Literary Form in the Spectator - Scott Black
Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere - Brian Cowan
Richard Steele and the Genealogy of Sentimental Drama: A Reading of The Conscious Lovers - Peter Hynes
Defining the Rake and Identifying His Demise in Addison and Steele's Spectator and Tattler - Theresa Hemsoth



Alexander Pope =Student Essay
Pope: Bipolar Implication - Irvin Ehrenpreis
Pope at Chiswick - Jonathan Pritchard
Slouching toward Augusta: Alexander Pope's 1736 "Windsor Forest" - Scott M. Cleary
Alexander Pope and Duke Upon Duke: Satiric Context, Aims, and Means - Pat Rogers
Commodity and Religion in Pope's The Rape of the Lock - Alex Eric Hernandez
Pope and the Allegorical Mode - Michael C. Hall
The Jacobite Poets of Richmond - Donald Bruce
The "Garbage Heap" of Memory: At Play in Pope's Archives of Dulness - Harold Weber
Nameless Names: Pope, Curll, and the Uses of Anonymity - Pat Rogers
Alexander Pope and Duke upon Duke: Satiric Context, Aims, and Means - Pat Rogers
Imitation in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard - Debra Leissner
Pope, Publishing, and Popular Interpretations of the 'Dunciad Variorum' - Shef Rogers
Pope and Plagiarism - Richard Terry
Pope, John Rackett, and the Slave Trade - Jonathan Pritchard
Pope and the Rhetoric of Natural Phenomena - Roseanne S. Carrara
Defending the Self: Pope and his Horatian poems - John Richardson
Alexander Pope, the Ideal of the Hero, Ovid, and Menippean Satire - Ulrich Broich
Living on the Margin: Alexander Pope and the Rural Ideal - Claudia Thomas Kairoff
Alexander Pope's Epistle to Bolingbroke and the Rhetoric of Embodied Exemplarity - Helen Deutsch
Pope and the Paradoxical Centrality of the Satirist - Thomas Woodman
Alexander Pope and the Somerset Family - Michael Brennan
Alexander Pope and the Nature of Language - Simon Alderson
"So easy to be lost": Poet and Self in Pope's The Temple of Fame - David Wheeler
Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope, Icon/Symbol - James I. Wimsatt
Severed hair from Donne to Pope - Erik Gray
Pope's Recusancy - Peter Davidson
The Dunciad and the City: Pope and Heterotopia - Brean Hammond
Cato's Ghosts: Pope, Addison, and Opposition Cultural Politics - Jorge Bastos da Silva
"Mighty Mother": Pope and the Maternal - Jane Spencer
Pope's Epistle to Bathurst and the Meaning of Finance - Tom Jones
Wealth and Words: Pope's "Epistle to Bathurst" - James Engell
Pope: Rape of the Lock - Ian McKillop
Dryden, Pope, and Swift: Intimacy and Eclecticism - Ian McKillop
Alexander Pope's portrayal of Belinda and her society in The Rape of the Lock - Ian Mackean
Pope's Ombre Enigmas in The Rape of the Lock - Oliver R. Baker
A Question of Competence: The Card Game in Pope's Rape of the Lock - Kathryn Walls
The Rape of the Lock and the Origins of Game Theory - Sean R. Silver
The Use of Supernatural Machinery in The Rape of the Lock - Beena A. Mahida
The Influence of Chronic Illness upon the Writings of Alexander Pope - E. M. Papper
Alexander Pope: His Spinal Deformity and His Doctors - O. P. Sharma
Defining Self and Others: Pope and Eighteenth-century Gender Ideology - Carole Fabricant
Alien voices, ancient echoes: Bakhtin, dialogism, and Pope's Essay on Criticism - Mary Ellen Bellanca
Precious to Grace: Necessary Desolation in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard - Mary Elizabeth Hotz
Exploring the Literate Blindspot: Alexander Pope's Homer In Light of Milman Parry - Elizabeth A. Hoffman
The Letters of Alexander Pope Considered - Henry Hubert Schmitz
'Hand in hand to posterity'? Reading politics in Swift and Pope - Valerie Rumbold
Comparison of Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and Pope's "Rape of the Lock" - Susan Siferd
Alexander Pope: The Portrait of the Artist as a Critic - Matt Kliewer



Samuel Johnson =Student Essay
Johnson's Divided Mind - Adam Kirsch
Narratives of hope, fictions of happiness: Samuel Johnson and enlightenment experience - Samuel T. Joeckel
Reading the "religious" language of Samuel Johnson's Sermons - Thomas G. Kass
Imitation in the neo-Latin poetry of Samuel Johnson - David F. Venturo
Sola fide? Samuel Johnson and the Augustinian doctrine of salvation - Gregory Scholtz
Johnson, Boswell & The Biographer's Quest - Jeffrey Meyers
Radical Letters and Male Genealogies in Johnson's 'Dictionary' - Dennis Dean Kezar, Jr.
Repetitive patterns in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas - Duane H. Smith
Samuel Johnson's "love of truth" and literary fraud - Jack Lynch
Samuel Johnson, urban culture, and the geography of Post-fire London - Nicholas Hudson
Johnson and his "Readers" in the Epistolary Rambler Essays - Manushag N. Powell
Reading the "religious" language of Samuel Johnson's Sermons - Thomas G. Kass
The Englishing of Juvenal: Computational Stylistics and Translated Texts - John Burrows
Allegory in the Rambler - Lisa Berglund
The Georgian Way of Death - Kate Chisholm
Formal verse imitation and the rhetorical principles of imitation
      in the Neo-Latin poetry of Samuel Johnson - David F. Venturo
Studied Barbarity: Johnson, Spenser, and Literary Progress - Jack Lynch
Restless Wrestling: Johnson's Rasselas - N. Hilton
Samuel Johnson's Rasselas: A Perspective on Islam - Richard F. Fleck
Johnson's Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia and the Culture of the East - Said I. Abdelwahed
Pursuit as Happiness: The Dilemma of Rasselas - Lance Wilcox
The History of Rasselas - Ian McKillop
Adventures in Literary Sleuthing: An Old Edition of Samuel Johnson's Works - Jack Stark
"The most fatal of all faults": Samuel Johnson on Prior's Solomon and the need for variety - Matthew M. Davis
Rasselas' Answer to Vanity - Anthony House
Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare: Then and Now - Anthony House
Station in Life and the Search for Meaning for Thel and Rasselas - Anthony House
The Search for Happiness: Rasselas in Jane Eyre - Shelby White



Thomas Gray =Student Essay
Persona, Elegy, and Desire - Chris Mounsey
Elegy unto Epitaph: Print Culture and Commenorative Practice in Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard" - Michele Turner Sharp
Gray, the Marketplace, and the Masculine Poet - Linda Zionkowski
Explication of Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard - Michael J. Cummings
Explication of A Long Story - Martin Porter



Oliver Goldsmith =Student Essay
"The Deserted Village" and the Politics of Genre - Alfred Lutz
The Story of O: Politics and Pleasure in The Vicar of Wakefield - Timothy Dykstal
From Patrimony to Paternity in The Vicar of Wakefield - David Aaron Murray
Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms:
          The Vicar of Wakefield as a Test Case of a Cultural-Historical Narratology - Vera Nunning



William Cowper =Student Essay
Cowper's 'Task' and The Writing of a Poet's Salvation - Deborah Heller
William Cowper's Gypsies - Sarah Houghton-Walker
"Meaner themes": Mock-Heroic and Providentialism in Cowper's Poetry - Richard Terry
News, Blues, and Cowper's Busy World - Julie Ellison
Rescuing the Castaway: The Case of William Cowper - John Greening
Localizing the Problem of Evil: William Cowper and the Poetics of Perspectivalism - Samuel Joeckel
Hope and Despair in the Writings of William Cowper - Barbara Packer
Insanity and Spiritual Songs in the Soul of a Saint: Reflections on the Life of William Cowper - John Piper



William Collins =Student Essay
Collins, Thomson, and the Whig Progress of Liberty - William Levine
Odes of Absorption in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century - Margaret Koehler
The Aesthetics of Separation: Collins's "Ode Occasion'd by the Death of Mr. Thomson." - Karen A. Wiseman



Christopher Smart =Student Essay
All the Crumbling Edifices Must Come Down: Decoding Christopher Smart's Song to David - John Rose
Christopher Smart's Old Woman's Oratory and the Patent Theatres:
nbsp;      Legitimacy, Transgression, and "rational Mirth" - Noel Chevalier
Diagnosing Christopher's case: Smart's readers and the authority of Pentecost - Alan Jacobs
Smart's bawdy politic: masculinity and the second age of horn in 'Jubilate Agno.' - Clement Hawes
Insolent Women and Crest-fallen Men: Christopher Smart,The Midwife, and Literary Travestism - Ross King



James Thomson =Student Essay
Collins, Thomson, and the Whig Progress of Liberty - William Levine
The Jacobite Poets of Richmond - Donald Bruce
Thomson's Poetry of Reverie and Milton - David Reid
"A just balance between patronage and the press": The case of James Thomson - James Sambrook
"[A] play, which I presume to call original": Appropriation, creative genius, and eighteenth-century playwriting - Paulina Kewes



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Page created by Anniina Jokinen on
1 October 2003. Last updated October 30, 2011.