Exploratory, investigative, and energetically analytical, 1650–1850 covers the full expanse of long-eighteenth-century thought, writing, and art while delivering abundant revelatory detail. Essays on well-known cultural figures combine with studies of emerging topics to unveil a vivid rendering of a dynamic period, simultaneously committed to singular genius and universal improvement.

The contributors to volume 30 join with Enlightenment thinkers in pulling, pushing, and stretching the elastic boundaries of human experience. Essays on comical apocalypticism, the evolution of satire, and the Asian periphery of English literature open a volume that offers two special features on extreme aspects of a modernizing world. The first probes the undiscovered world of last wills and testaments, while the second explores the soaring world of eighteenth-century birds. As always, 1650–1850 culminates in a bevy of book reviews critiquing the latest scholarship on long-established specialties, unusual subjects, and broad reevaluations of the period.
 
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
ISSN: 1065-3112
 

EDITOR: Kevin L. Cope is the Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The author of Criteria of Certainty, John Locke Revisited, and In and After the Beginning, Cope has prepared numerous essay collections, most recently Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press). Cope is a frequent guest on radio and television programming concerning higher education policy and governance.

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: Samara Anne Cahill taught literature, rhetoric, and grant writing at Blinn College, Nanyang Technological University, and the University of Notre Dame before joining The University of North Texas as a grant manager. She is the editor of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment and author of Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Bucknell University Press).