"Assembling a range of original scholarly essays on the literature of the long eighteenth century, this collection is concerned primarily with the exploration of the complex field, and authors' uses, of genre and form. The contributors address issues of the development and progress of epic conventions, architectural design in fiction, formal and generic hybridity in the works of Sarah Fielding, and the revision process and overall plan of Thomson's The Seasons. Other contributions aim to historicise genres, especially graveyard poetry and the labouring-class "work" poem, and investigate modes of travel writing or the intergeneric collaboration of pictorial language and sentimentalism in the tableau tradition. The multifarious landscape of literary production and the processes of generic experimentation and innovation are charted, and the essays in this collection provide important interventions on the significance of formal criticism for modern historicising literary scholarship."--P. [4] of cover.