Focusing on poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry investigates pastoral poetry and literary patronage in ways that shift prevailing notions of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic poetry.

This article uses Eve Sedgwick's 'Jane Austen and the masturbating girl' to explore the place of reading in contemporary critical practice. Noting that hostile accounts of Sedgwick have focused on her alleged inability to 'read closely,' the article argues that Sedgwick's work represents a wider move away from close reading to a criticism characterized by confession, autobiography, against-the grain reading, fantasy, parody and creative writing. This model-which I call 'loose reading'-throws light on the assumptions of close reading; it also has implications for political activism and teaching practice in schools. This article explores Sedgwick's place within lesbian and gay studies and queer theory; it also relates her loose readings to feminist, new historicist and postcolonial criticism. Although welcoming many aspects of loose reading, especially its relation to fantasy, it cautions against a total acceptance of non-attentive textual analysis. The article also discusses the relationship between reading practice and the role of 'good citizenship' in Britain's National Curriculum.

Via its setting and plot, Worth Fighting With dramatizes some of the most urgent concerns in contemporary English Studies, notably the splintering of the discipline into discrete areas of enquiry; the resultant methodological conflicts between `theory¿ and `literary criticism¿, and; the impact of new research and management cultures. Thus, the novel engages with the same questions that emerge in non-fiction explorations of the academic humanities such as Bill Readings¿s The University in Ruins (Harvard UP, 1997) and Derek Bok¿s Universities in the Marketplace (Stanford UP, 2004). Thematically, the book is concerned both with questions of literary value and with the larger issue of whether literature (or other forms of cultural expression, including literary criticism) can really produce social or personal change. In particular, the novel asks its reader to re-evaluate existing attitudes to `minor¿ literature. However this is not pursued in the terms set out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Instead, Worth Fighting With explores the potential of a domestic tradition, as represented by writers such as Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Angus Wilson and Margaret Drabble. In doing so, the book also stages the divisions between urban and non-metropolitan versions of `Englishness¿ ¿ a move that complicates the very idea of `English¿ literature.

This article traces the evolution of modern histories of eighteenth-centurytheories of luxury and of sexuality; it argues that although these fields arecrucially related, few commentators have linked them in an effectivemanner. It gives brief accounts of work by John Sekora and ChristopherBerry, both of whom explore luxury in terms of socio-economic theoriesderived partly from J. G. A. Pocock. The article argues that theseeconomic theories pay insufficient attention to the sexualized nature ofeighteenth-century writings on luxury - in particular, they shy away fromanalysis of effeminacy even though this term is frequently encountered inenlightenment attacks on excessive economic consumption. Then there isan outline of recent work about gender and sexuality in the eighteenthcentury; this mentions Alan Bray, G. S. Rousseau, Randolph Trumbach,and others. This section traces the contributions that these writers havemade to histories of effeminacy and homosexuality, but notes that they areless interested than they might be in luxury and the body politic. Thearticle also argues that historians of luxury and sexuality tend to ignorevisual aspects of eighteenth-century culture, although recent texts by TerryCastle and Kristina Straub use theories of the gaze to explore enlightenmentconstructions of gender. The article then describes a series of papersfrom Luxurious Sexualities: Effeminacy, Consumption and the Body Politicin Eighteenth-Century Representation, a multi-disciplinary conferencefeaturing scholars working on luxury, masculinity, the body, sexuality,and economic discourse in the eighteenth-century. The writers discussedare: Cath Sharrock (writing on masturbation and sodomy), Philip Carter(on effeminacy and economic theories of luxury), Miles Ogborn (onvisual aspects of Macaroni culture in Vauxhall Gardens), Robert Jones (oneffeminacy and military encampments), Sue Wiseman (on representationsof the breast as both luxurious and virtuous), Marcia Pointon (on jewelleryin representations of Queen Charlotte), and Brian Young (on Gibbon andsex).

Literary fiction. Harrington Gay Men's Literary Quarterly, 2007. Volume 8 (3), pp. 27-34.