A tale of a tub / John Traugott -- Gulliver and the gentle reader / Claude Rawson -- Rhetoric and poems: the example of Swift / William K. Wimsatt -- Pope: bipolar implication / Irvin Ehrenpreis -- Alexander Pope: the political poet in his time / Howard Erskine-Hill -- "A double capacity": The beggar's opera / Ian Donaldson -- Generic transformation and social change: rethinking the rise of the novel / Michael McKeon -- Life as pilgrimage and as theater / Ronald Paulson -- Robinson Crusoe: the self as master / John J. Richetti -- Defoe's prose style: the language of interpretation / G.A. Starr -- Penetration and impenetrability in Clarissa / Leo Braudy -- Tom Jones: irony and judgment / John Preston -- Smollett and the the old conventions / Michael Rosenblum -- Pastoral war in Tristram shandy / Richard A. Lanham -- Learning to read Johnson: The vision of Theodore and The vanity of human wishes / Lawrence Lipking -- Structure and absence in Boswell's Life of Johnson / William C. Dowling -- "Our unnatural no-voice": the heroic epistle, Pope, and women's Gothic / Gillian Beer -- The flight from history in mid-century poetry / John Sitter -- The urbane sublime / Marshall Brown -- Dynamics of fear: Fanny Burney / Patricia Meyer Spacks.