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A revisionist interdisciplinary study of the transformation of England into an imperial power between 1550 and 1850.
This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol and bristling topicality of its satires as well as in the imaginative flight of its mock epics, fictions, and heroic verse. The volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion will allow us to read the period anew.
In this concluding volume of his trilogy on social theory, W. G. Runciman applies to the case of twentieth-century English society the methodology (distinguishing reportage, explanation, description, and evaluation) and theory of the preceding two volumes. Volume III shows how England's capitalist mode of production, liberal mode of persuasion, and democratic mode of coercion evolved in the aftermath of the First World War from what they had been since the 1880s, but then did not, in turn, evolve significantly following the Second World War. The explanation rests on an analysis of the selective pressures favouring some economic, ideological, and political practices over others in an increasingly complex environment, neither predictable nor controllable by policy-makers. This is supported by a graphic account of the changes themselves and how they were experienced by different segments of English society.
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Today's hunting debate began in the eighteenth century, when the idea of the countryside was being invented through the imaginative displacement of agricultural production in favour of country sports and landscape tourism. Between the Game Act of 1671 and its repeal in 1831, writers on walking and hunting often held opposed views, but contributed equally to the origins of modern ecology, while sharing a commitment to trespass that preserved common rights in an era of growing privatization.