Preface

Summary

The publication of this volume, the second of two, represents the conclusion of a project on which I have been working for over twenty-five years. In the course of work on both volumes I have incurred many debts. Over the last few years my most pressing consideration has been finding the time to write the second; fellow academics who have struggled to produce serious works of scholarship against the competing and ever increasing demands of teaching, examining, and administration will understand the reasons for my delay. I am grateful to the Principal and Fellows of St Hugh's College for granting me terms of leave in 1992, 1994, and 1997, to the British Academy for a term of research leave in 1995, and to the Oxford English Faculty for enabling me to have a lighter college teaching load, all of which have helped to make completion of the book possible. Almost all my reading was done in the Bodleian Library; I am grateful to the Upper Reading Room staff and especially the Keeper of Western Manuscripts, Mary Clapinson, for her skill in retrieving supposedly missing books. The London Library has also proved invaluable.

Of all who have taken an interest in the completion of this project, my thanks go especially to Dr Brian Young of the University of Sussex for reading and commenting on the whole of the second volume with such care. Professor M. A. Stewart has scrutinised Chapters 2, 3, and 4, and has been a mine of information about Scots and Irish writers.