Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Contents 5
3. Comparative Practices in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century 7
4. The Creation of the English Nation: Alfred the Great as Role Model 25
5. The Circulating Library, the Novel, and Implicit Practices of Comparing in Eighteenth-Century England: Assembling ‘Middle-Class’ Literariness 45
6. Comparing Conduct: English Novels of the Long Eighteenth Century and the Formation of Ideals of Social Behaviour 77
7. The Complexity of Narrative Comparisons in Wollstonecraft’s Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman and Lennox’s The Female Quixote 105
8. “’tis by Comparison we can Judge and Chuse [sic!]”: Incomparable Oroonoko 125
9. Articulating Differences: Practices of Comparing in British Travel Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century 149
10. Oceans of Non-Relation: Affect and Narcissistic Imperialism in Sea Poetry by James Thomson, Charlotte Brontë, and Hannah More 179
11. Practices of Comparing in Eighteenth-Century Grammars of English 203
12. Authors and Editors 223