Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remainsContinue Reading

In the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding are the two most influential figures. Richardson is best known for his three epistolary* (in the form of letters) novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748)Continue Reading

Characterized by highly stylized poetic dialogue, larger-than-life heroes and idealized heroines, and sensationalistic action often played out in exotic locales, heroic tragedy is a genre of English drama that flourished in the years of the Restoration. John Dryden, the dominant playwright and dramatic theorist of his time, wrote extensively inContinue Reading