The fourth volume of The Pelican Guide to English Literature covers the period from Dryden to Johnson. It begins with a survey of the social context of English Literature during this period, followed by a survey of the literature itself, much of it literature of the Augustan Age. 

          The rest of the book is made up of a series of essays dealing in detail with Dryden, Swift, Pope; the Essayists, the novelists Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne; Goldsmith, Johnson etc. There are also essays on Hogarth, and eighteenth century architecture and planning. Finally the volume contains an appendix of biographies and bibliographies.

CONTENTS:

PART 1: THE SOCIAL SETTING
     Writer and Public – The Normal as Novel – Enterprise and Development – The Eminence of London – Worlds Overseas – Provincial Life – Temperate Politics – The Sense of Society – Faith and Morals – Reason and Feeling – Social Benevolence – Cultural Variegation

PART 2: THE LITERARY SCENE
     The Critical Background – The Responsibilities of Literature – Wit and Its Functions – The General and the Original – The Canons of Style – French Precedents – Classical Precedents – The Life of Augustan Styles – Literary Outlines: Prose – Verse – Drama

PART 3
     John Dryden
     Restoration Comedy
     Literature and Science
     Defoe as Novelist
     Language 1660-1784
     The Periodical Essayists
     Swift and the Tradition of Wit
     Books, Readers and Patrons
     Poetry in the Eighteenth Century
     Alexander Pope
     Integrity and Dramatic Life in Pope’s Poetry
     William Hogarth
     Samuel Richardson
     Fielding and Smollett
     Tristram Shandy and the Arts of Fiction
     Augustan Reflective Poetry
     Oliver Goldsmith
     Shakespeare Criticism
     William Cowper
     Samuel Johnson
     Architecture and Landscape