Sustaining Literature is a collection of scholarly essays by leading scholars on texts, writers, and cultural interests that represent the interests of the late scholar of the Renaissance and the eighteenth-century, Simon Varey. Many of the essays examine questions of textual, historical, and cultural evidence in the study of eighteenth-century literature. They address such writers as Dryden, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, and Haywood, and such issues as Restoration satire, anti-Walpole journalism, economics and fiction, historiography, rhetoric, anatomy, food, the Cock Lane Ghost, and the Enlightenment understanding of caves, volcanoes, and spelunking. The volume concludes with a bibliography of the works of Simon Varey.