Books:

• Spenser and Literary Pictorialism. Princeton: Princeton
  University Press, 1972.
• Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
  - Winner of the Gottschalk Prize, Awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies to the best book
  published in 1987 on the eighteenth century.
  - Chapter 2 reprinted in Norton Critical Edition of
  Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel. New York,
  Norton, 1993
  - Chapter 2 reprinted in The New Historicism and Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Kiernan Ryan, 1996
  - Chapter 3 reprinted in Norton Critical Edition of Journal
  of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backsheider. New York:
  Norton, 1992
• The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. with David Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990
• Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. with David Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991
• The Columbia History of the British Novel, associate editor with John Richetti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, ed. (with Simon Stern) and introduction by John Bender. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
  1996.
• Regimes of Description, ed. (with Michael Marrinan). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
• The Culture of Diagram (with Michael Marrinan). Forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2009.
• Fictions of Enlightenment: Collected Essays by John Bender, under contract with Stanford University Press for 2010.

Articles:

• "Affinities Between Jacobean Masques and Plays," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 17 (1974), 9-12
• "The Edge of the Abyss," Times Literary Supplement, 27 February 1976
• "The Age of Ambiguity," Times Literary Supplement, 17 December 1976
• "The Poet in the House of Proteus," Times Literary Supplement, 19 August 1977
• "The Paradoxes of Piranesi," Times Literary Supplement, 19 May 1978
• "The Day of The Tempest," ELH, 47 (1980), 235-258
  "Liberating the Sister Arts: the Revolution of Blake's 'Infant Sorrow,': ELH, 50 (1983), pp. 297-319. (With Anne K. Mellor as co-author.)
• "The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary: Narrative and Ideology in Defoe, Gay, Hogarth, and Fielding," Stanford Literature Review, I (1984), 55-94
  - reprinted in The Country Myth, ed. H. George Hahn. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991
  - reprinted The English Novel: 1700 To Fielding, ed. Richard Kroll (Macmillan/Longman: in press for 1999)
• "Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield," in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. London: Methuen, 1987
• "Narrative" in The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990
• "Pictorialism: in The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990
• "Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric" (with David Wellbery), pp. 3-39 in The Ends of Rhetoric. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990
  - reprinted in Stanford Slavic Studies, 4 (1991)
  - reprinted in Texte und Lektüren, ed. Aleida Assmann. Fischer Verlag, 1996
  -reprinted in Neo-retorica é Déconstruçao. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Uerj, 1998.
• "A New History of the Enlightenment?" in Leo Damrosch, ed., The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
  - reprinted in Eighteenth-Century Life, 16 (1992)
• "Eighteenth-Century Studies" in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds., Redrawing the Boundaries, New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992
• "Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams" in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, Roger B. Henkle and Robert M. Polhemus, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994
  - also published as "Unpersonliche Gewalt: der durchdringende Blick und das Erzahlfeld in William Godwin's Caleb Williams" in Schrift, ed. H.U. Gumbrecht and K.L.
  Pfeiffer. Paederborn and Munich: Fink Verlag, 1993
  - illustrated version published in Vision and Textuality, ed. Steven Melville and Bill Readings, (London: Macmillan, 1995)
• "Making the World Safe for Narratology: A Reply to Dorrit Cohn," NLH, 26 (1995), 29-33
• "Fiktionalitat in der Aufklarung" in Nach der Aufklarung? Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995
• "Fiktionens rolle i oplysningens aestekik," Ny Poetik 6 (1996), 28-35
• "Nachword" in Nach der Aufklarung? Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995
• "Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis," Representations 61 (1998), 6-28
  --reprinted in Eighteenth-Century Genres and Cultures; Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, eds. Cynthia Wall & Dennis Todd (University of Delaware Press, 2001)
• "Matters of Fact, Virtual Witnessing, and the Public in Hogarth's Narratives" in Hogarth: Representing 'Nature's Machines', eds. David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, & Peter Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)
• “From Theater to Laboratory,” Journal of the American Medical Association, March 6, 2002
• “Hume’s Learned and Conversible Worlds” (with Robin Valenza) in Just Being Difficult?, ed Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003
• “Der Roman als Moderner Mythos,” Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäsiches Denken. December, 2004.
• “The Novel as Modern Myth," in Defoe’s Footprints: Essays in Honour of Maximillian E. Novak, ed. Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), forthcoming 2009
• “Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment," This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner, undersubmission, University of Chicago Press, for 2010