Novel Bodies examines the significant role that disability plays in shaping the British literary history of sexuality. Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured reveal emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy.
 

Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature by focusing on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction.

The Global Wordsworth examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth’s poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialog with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth’s career and its place in the canon.
 

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century British culture. Samara Anne Cahill’s ambitious study explores two separate but overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam in the eighteenth century which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents, and the other tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s.
 

Like Virgil, who depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed here imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor.

In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Ultimately, Jane Austen and Comedy invites its reader to take seriously Austen’s production of laughter and to keep laughing nonetheless.
 

This collection explores relationships between Samual Johnson and several of his main contemporaries—James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver
Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton—and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within
those relationships.