This chapter shows how ‘Liberty’ gained an ideological colouring in the eighteenth century largely due to its capacity to embrace a number of artistic/political perspectives, from an opposition to the legacy of anti-Walpole sentiments derived from centralising governmental influence, to an aesthetic reversal of taste away from generic prescription to a specific association with Whiggish denial of some inherited property rights. Goldsmith is rarely regarded as a deep political thinker, yet he mixed with several who could be thought to be polemicists for Liberty. This chapter shows how his poetry (The Traveller and The Deserted Village), plays (The Good Natur’d Man and She Stoops to Conquer) and his prose (The Citizen of the World) gave voice to his interrogation of English libertarian myths.

Satire and Sentiment’ proposes that the commingling of sentimental and satiric modes in Goldsmith’s oeuvre enables him to negotiate the tension between moral ideals and intractable historical structures, using the movement between sentimental and satiric registers to interrogate the difficulty of living in the face of the political, social, and economic changes in Great Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on novels like The Vicar of Wakefield, ‘spy narratives’ like The Citizen of the World, poems like The Traveller and The Deserted Village, and plays like She Stoops to Conquer, the chapter investigates what might be termed the performative dimension of sentimentality and satire in narrative, poetic, and dramatic forms.

Authorship’ lays out the range of positions on the place of the author in Goldsmith’s work, contextualizing it in the evolving literary field of mid-century publishing, and drawing on studies of authorship and the book trade ranging from Dustin Griffin, Linda Zionkowski, and Martha Woodmansee to more recent work by Nicholas Hudson and Mark Wildermuth. The chapter focuses primarily on two major texts, the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) and The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), where the issue of authorship comes most obviously to the fore.

This chapter argues that for Oliver Goldsmith religious belief was thoroughly embedded in the world. It was not defined by theological niceties or intellectual conviction but by the rhythms of Anglican ritual and everyday acts of reverence, piety, and benevolence. Culture and politics were, therefore, inseparable from religion. With this in mind, the religion/secular divide that permeates much of our contemporary thinking must be abandoned when we approach Goldsmith’s work. His engagement with religion should be assessed not according to the doctrines he explicitly espoused (or failed to espouse) but according to religion’s practical function within his oeuvre.

This chapter recounts the manner in which Goldsmith’s pamphlet The Mystery Revealed (1762), uncovering the hoax of the famous Cock Lane Ghost in London, is a sign – as are the many significant references to ghosts in his works – of his rejection of supernatural occurrences and his defence of rational Enlightenment values.

In comparison to other canonical writers of the mid eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith has left little from which his views on fiction might be ascertained. This chapter considers both canonical English novels of the middle of the century, and contemporary French writing, as important contexts for the study of Goldsmith’s fiction, and in particular his Vicar of Wakefield. Also considered are problematic attributions to Goldsmith of works other than his famed Vicar, and the longevity and geographical reach of that novel’s appeal.

Why was Oliver Goldsmith interested in the Orient? Specifically what parts of the Orient was he most interested in? Where did he obtain his information about the Orient? How did he modify his sources and what is distinctive about his literary uses of the Orient? Although critics have accused Goldsmith variously of fabricating an imaginary and exotic Orient, exploiting the Orient merely for satirical uses, and being sick of Oriental fads, this chapter argues that Goldsmith’s interest in the Orient was intellectual as well as imaginative, serious, and playful at the same time. The chapter focuses on Goldsmith’s most extensive engagement with the Orient in The Citizen of the World, but also examines his discussions of the Orient in his book reviews, theater reviews, periodical publications, and his more extensive historical and geographical writings.