Peter A. Tasch, 76, Temple professor and literary scholar

Peter A. Tasch had an enthusiasm for an 18th-century dramatist a bit more obscure than Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

In 1972, Bucknell University Press published Mr. Tasch's work The Dramatic Cobbler: The Life and Works of Isaac Bickerstaff.

A 1974 review in the journal Modern Philology declared that Bickerstaff was the enigmatic theatrical hack whose Love in a Village was the most popular comic opera of the 18th century.

Mr. Tasch, 76, of Germantown, chairman of the English department at Temple University from 1988 to 1990, died of multiple system atrophy Sunday, July 25, at Pennsylvania Hospital.

Mr. Tasch taught in the English department at Temple from 1964 until he retired as professor in 2001.

A scholar of 18th-century English literature, Mr. Tasch did not limit himself to the obscure.

He edited Fables by the Late Mr. John Gay, author of the 1727 play The Beggar's Opera, the basis for Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera of 1928.

A daughter, Kate Tasch, said Garland Press published that work in the early 1980s.

Mr. Tasch was an associate editor, she said, of Britain in the Hanoverian Age 1714-1837: An Encyclopedia, by Leslie Ellen Brown and Gerald Newman, published in 1997 in the Garland Reference Library of the Humanities.

Mr. Tasch was a cofounder of the literary journal The Scriblerian, the website for which says that it is concerned with such 18th-century writers as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.

His daughter said that he was its coeditor from 1968 to 2000.

Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Tasch earned a bachelor's degree in English at Bucknell University in 1954 and served as an Army clerk typist from 1954 to 1957.

Mr. Tasch earned a master's in English at Columbia University in 1959 and a diploma in English studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1960.

From 1961 to 1964, he was a junior fellow in the graduate school of arts and sciences at Harvard University, which, his daughter said, was "an alternative to a Ph.D. for promising young scholars."

At Temple, she said, Mr. Tasch was director of the honors program from 1977 to 1983 and director of the writing program in the English Language Enrichment Center at Temple (ELECT) from 1970 to 1973.

Besides his daughter, Mr. Tasch is survived by his wife of 49 years, Alison; a son, Jeremy; and a daughter, Alex.

A memorial service is to be scheduled.