Designed to complement DeMaria's textbook British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology , this critical reader contains seventeen essays by sixteen contemporary literary critics and covers the full range of works printed in the anthology.

Robert DeMaria Jr is Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology in Blackwell's Anthologies series and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1993) in Blackwell's Critical Biography series, and of several other books, including Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986).