The main theme of this broad-ranging study is the interaction of ideology and literature in the "long eighteenth century", the period that runs from the late Stuarts to the age of Jane Austen and the Romantics. Professor Speck pays due attention to formal literatureto the public poetry of the age, both celebratory and satirical; to the theatre; and to the emergence of the novel as a key medium for political and social reflection. He considers the work of minor - and thus perhaps more truly representative - writers, alongside the unmistakably individual voices of a Swift, a Byron and an Austen, for what they can reveal of the eighteenth century's beliefs and prejudices as they talk amongst themselves of the matters that concerned them. However, the material he examines here goes far beyond the purely 'literary' to include newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, even the popular prints of artists and caricaturists like Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson. In the process, he makes his own contribution to advancing the current debates concerning continuity and change in the eighteenth century. The result is a book that will be of interest to social and political historians, literary analysts, and any reader interested in the culture and society of the Augustan Age.