Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.

Chapter 8 focuses on a uniquely descriptive scene in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) where the heroine is depicted under arrest, kneeling in silent prayer, with her finger enclosed in a Bible to mark where she had been reading. This chapter also briefly discusses book scenes in Richardson’s Pamela (1740), where the heroine is compared to the Book of Common Prayer. This chapter shows how Richardson uses the authority associated with devotional reading to hallow our imaginative, psychological descent into his fictional characters.

This chapter takes a careful corpus-based look at the politeness vocabulary of the eighteenth century. It starts with a wide-angle perspective of the terms politeness, civility and courtesy in general-purpose corpora before moving on to a more detailed analysis of a larger selection of politeness- and impoliteness-related lexical items in a dedicated corpus of eighteenth-century epistolary novels by Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney. In the second part of this chapter, two case studies are devoted to the sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele and the domestic tragedy The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell by George Lillo. Both plays have a strong and explicit educational intent. They want to instruct and entertain and help their audiences to become better human beings who rise above the mere observance of rules of etiquette.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that Richardson’s private and public readers participated in the authorship of and influenced the revisions to his novels.His first novel, Pamela (1740), is perhaps the most notorious object of eighteenth-century revision, given Richardson’s lengthy interactions with his readers and his concern about their responses.Richardson was goaded into writing a sequel to Pamela that was ironically indebted to the “fan fiction” he sought to disparage, in particular John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741).His second novel, Clarissa (1747–48), was composed in consultation with his literary network, as he unhesitatingly added material to remove the nuance from Lovelace’s villainous character and incorporated sexually implicit material into the third edition.For his third novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), Richardson solicited letters from his friends in an attempt to create a fully collaborative final volume.Although only one of his correspondents attempted a letter, Richardson’s requests for and responses to model letters from his literary circle anticipate a type of social authorship that reached its fullest potential decades later.

Shakespeare’s status as a dramatist underwent a remarkable transformation in the eighteenth century, but the Sonnets seem to have no place in this narrative. This is usually blamed on the difficulty of getting hold of the Quarto, as opposed to the accessibility of Benson’s Poems. However, this chapter argues that what reputation the Sonnets had in the eighteenth century is largely thanks to Benson. It examines the places where we might expect to find the Sonnets but don’t - in anthologies, the novel and the sentimental sonnet - and tries to explain what the Sonnets seemed to be lacking to an eighteenth century reader. It also re-examines Edmond Malone’s reprinting of the Quarto in 1780, which has been hailed as rescuing the Sonnets from oblivion, but whose insistence on a biographical reading, and on a division between male and female addressees, would have damaging consequences for the Sonnets individually. The chapter ends with the controversy surrounding Sonnet 2, and the struggles of George Chalmers and Coleridge to deal with Malone’s legacy and preserve their ideal of Shakespeare.