This volume presents fifteen original essays that move from structural and thematic subjects to matters of historical and cultural significance. Contributors to Quick Springs of Sense cover a remarkably wide variety of the literary interests and figures of England from the Augustan Age until midcentury including the periodical, Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe, Fielding, the episodic novel as a genre, Smollett, Sterne, and the poetry of Swift and Pope. Its variety and liveliness aptly convey the vigor of the neoclassical age itself where there were many quick springs of sense.

Contributions by: B. Reid, Thomas R. Preston, Benjamin Boyce, John M. Aden, James L. Clifford, Robert White, J. C. T. Oates, Calhoun Winton, Oliver W. Ferguson, A. S. Knowles, C. J. Rawson, J. Paul Hunter, H. K. Russell, Arthur Cash, Jean-Claude Sallé