The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. 
 

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919 and in print ever since, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. This collection sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study showing that this often maligned and frequently ignored period is crucial in its own right.

From 1764 through 1766, John Dickinson’s writings reveal how he became a leading figure in the Pennsylvania Assembly and in the growing American resistance to unjust British taxation. Seeking protection of fundamental rights, he opposed Benjamin Franklin’s plan to abolish liberty of conscience in Pennsylvania, served as the lead draftsman in the Stamp Act Congress, and offered the American public the first practical advice on resisting British oppression.

Unsettling Sexuality brings queer, trans, and asexual lenses to bear on the long eighteenth century. Drawing from Middle-Eastern and Asian studies, African American studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, the authors pioneer intersectional readings of European, transatlantic, and global eighteenth-century archives that unsettle traditional ways of approaching the field, to welcome sexuality as something that can resist rigidity.