Exploratory, investigative, and energetically analytical, 1650-1850 covers the full expanse of long-eighteenth-century thought, writing, and art while delivering abundant revelatory detail. Essays on well-known cultural figures combine with studies of emerging topics to unveil a vivid rendering of a dynamic period, simultaneously committed to singular genius and universal improvement. The contributors to volume 30 join with Enlightenment thinkers in pulling, pushing, and stretching the elastic boundaries of human experience. Essays on comical apocalypticism, the evolution of satire, and the Asian periphery of English literature open a volume that offers two special features on extreme aspects of a modernizing world. The first probes the undiscovered world of last wills and testaments, while the second explores the soaring world of eighteenth-century birds. As always, 1650-1850 culminates in a bevy of book reviews critiquing the latest scholarship on long-established specialties, unusual subjects, and broad reevaluations of the period.   Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.   ISSN: 1065-3112