This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction, contemporary reviews of the novel, and primary source material relating to the novel’s composition and its philosophical influences (including documents by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin). Documents on education, political and religious corruption, and African colonization provide further historical context.
Shawn Lisa Maurer is Associate Professor of English at The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford University Press, 1998).