Philosophical Dictionary: Voltaire (Penguin Classics)

Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, first published in 1764, is a series of short, radical essays - alphabetically arranged - that form a brilliant and bitter analysis of the social and religious conventions that then dominated eighteenth-century French thought. One of the masterpieces of the Enlightenment, this enormously influential work of sardonic wit - more a collection of essays arranged alphabetically, than a conventional dictionary - considers such diverse subjects as Abraham and Atheism, Faith and Freedom of Thought, Miracles and Moses.

The Expansion of England, Essays on Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History

Confronting the contemporary poststructuralist debate from the perspective of cultural historiography, The Expansion of England presents an historical study of race and ethnicity.

Critical essays discuss the works of major dramatists of the Elizabethan age in this comprehensive volume. This title, Elizabethan Drama, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Period Studies series, features a selection of critical essays analyzing the writers and works that defined the Elizabethan era. In addition to a chronology of the important cultural, literary, and politcal events that shaped this period, this text includes an introduction and editor's note written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This introductory Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, provides individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell, together with general essays on the political, social  context, and the relationship of poetry to the mutations and developments of genre and tradition.