Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain

Seth Rudy is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Rhodes College, USA. Though devoted primarily to British poetry and prose of the eighteenth century, he has also published and presented work in the fields of Dickens studies, data visualization, and the modern history of print and digital encyclopedias.

• Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Concepts of Completeness 2. Complete Bodies, Whole Arts, and the Limits of Epic 3. Worlds Apart: Epic and Encyclopedia in the Augustan Age 4. Mid-Century Experiments in Encyclopedism 5. Collapse and Reconstitution: Epic and Encyclopedia Revisited Coda: The Angel and the Algorithm Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

“In Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, Seth Rudy ‘tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate ‘complete’ knowledge of the world’ and ‘explores the persistent failure of these ambitions’ … . Rudy’s book is a useful introduction to the form. … Rudy’s survey of this dilemma makes useful contributions to the history of scholarship.” (Jack Lynch, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)“Rudy’s impressive and judiciously selected range of material certainly addresses the parameters of ‘literature’ and ‘encyclopedism’ outlined in the title and gives us perceptive insights into what Rudy calls the productive indeterminacy of completeness as a literary feature … . Rudy thus offers an invaluable, if not foundational contribution to research in this area and his readers will be richly rewarded by the book’s considerable originality and perceptiveness.” (Adrian J. Wallbank, The BARS Review, Issue 47, Spring, 2016)