Preromanticism seeks the common ground of British literature from 1740 to 1798 not in the foreshadowing of Romanticism but in incomplete discoveries and in impediments to expression that Romanticism was to lift. Brown analyses several of the period’s major figures - Gray, Collins, Young, Cowper, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Beaumarchais, Schiller, and Stern, touching on French and German as well as British literature. This broadly comparative juxtaposition of philosophical and literary works often yields startling and compelling insights.