Author Description

The Edinburgh Magazine and Review is a critical journal of central importance to the Enlightenment. Many of the most influential historical and philosophical titles of the period are reviewed in its pages - among them Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Kames's Sketches of the History of Man and Monboddo's Origin of Language - and the most significant political development of the day, the unrest in the American colonies, is documented here in great detail. Divided into two sections, the 'Magazine' contains original political and historical articles, biographical memoirs, accounts of discoveries in medicine, science and agriculture, and original fiction and poetry by such well-known figures as Smollett and Beattie, and offers month by month accounts from the battlefields of Europe to the local politics and social activities of Edinburgh's polite (and not so polite) society. The innovative 'Review' section marks a departure from formulaic eighteenth-century literary criticism and pioneered a new and controversial kind of critique. In many instances the reviews became literature in their own right, both entertaining and instructing the reader. Critical accounts of no less than 175 works in every major genre are included. The two guiding intellectual forces behind the Edinburgh Magazine and Review were the historian Gilbert Stuart and the printer William Smellie. Other contributors include a cast of Enlightenment figures, among whom were believed to have been David Hume and Adam Smith. The new introduction to the set - describing, among other things, the infighting between the editors and their publisher, the lawsuits thrown at the editors, the importance of the work in the British critical tradition and the reason for its rather premature demise - puts this rich and diverse work in context and makes it more accessible to the modern reader. —very scarce work only found in a few library collections —a new index to the 5 volumes makes this s