Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Melinda Rabb is Professor of English with a special interest in the long 18th century. Her publications include Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650–1750 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture 1650–1765 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), as well as many articles and book chapters on authors and texts of the period in journals such as ELH and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and in volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson (2022), The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019), British Women Satirists of the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and The Blackwell Companion to Satire (2007). Her Cogut project is the completion of a new book. Parting Shots: War Trauma and English Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century examines literature’s role in mediating the disaster of war, especially civil war which is (one contemporary noted) “the most uncharitable mischiefe that a Common-wealth can be engaged in” because “wee . . . execute the designes of our enemies upon our selves.” The final chapter, “War and the Pursuit of Happiness,” looks toward America, and focuses on the postwar fixation on pursuing the elusive promise of wholeness and wellbeing after years of violent dissension.