Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714 is the most wide-ranging overview available of prose writing in English during one of the most tumultuous periods in British and Irish history. Stretching from the outbreak of the English Civil Wars to the death of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, the volume is unprecedented in the breadth of its coverage of an age in which prose moved from the margins of cultural life in Britain to its centre. The volume also breaks new ground in the diversity of the prose writing it covers: its thirty-six chapters by an array of established literary critics and historians capture the excitingly multiple forms that prose took in what was a golden age for non-fictional writing, but which also saw the emergence of modes of prose fiction that became part of the origin story of the eighteenth-century novel. This Handbook reflects that multiplicity and diversity in its structure. Four longer introductory chapters map the changing contexts of the publication and reception of prose in the period, as well as the influence of the classical heritage and the role of relations with continental Europe. The subsequent thirty-two chapters are organized by different categories of prose writing. The contributors approach key authors and texts from various and often unconventional perspectives. The volume offers coverage of well-known writers and texts while also capturing the assortment of prose writing in a time of rapid political and social change: there are chapters on, for example, 'Bites and Shams'; 'Circulation Narratives'; 'Keys'; 'Pornography'; 'Recipe Books'; 'True Accounts', and even 'Handbooks'.

Nicholas McDowell was born and grew up in Belfast and then studied at Cambridge and Oxford. He was a Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before joining the Department of English at the University of Exeter, where he is now Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought. His visiting positions have included Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is a former winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled 'The Poetry of Civil War'. Henry Power studied Classics and English at Brasenose College Oxford, and then read for a PhD in English at Cambridge. Since 2007, he has taught at the University of Exeter, where he is now Professor of English Literature. He is the author of Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (2015), and has edited Joseph Addison's miscellaneous prose writings for Oxford University Press. He has held visiting positions at All Souls College, Oxford and at the Beinecke Library in Yale.