“In Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, Seth Rudy ‘tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate ‘complete’ knowledge of the world’ and ‘explores the persistent failure of these ambitions’ … . Rudy’s book is a useful introduction to the form. … Rudy’s survey of this dilemma makes useful contributions to the history of scholarship.” (Jack Lynch, ... Read moreEighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016) “Rudy’s impressive and judiciously selected range of material certainly addresses the parameters of ‘literature’ and ‘encyclopedism’ outlined in the title and gives us perceptive insights into what Rudy calls the productive indeterminacy of completeness as a literary feature … . Rudy thus offers an invaluable, if not foundational contribution to research in this area and his readers will be richly rewarded by the book’s considerable originality and perceptiveness.” (Adrian J. Wallbank, The BARS Review, Issue 47, Spring, 2016) Show Less