LibGuides: Literatures in English: The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660-1836

Full Text Collections

ECCO: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. A digital archive of over 136,000 titles, including books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more, published in the UK and its colonies. Every word on over 26 million pages of text can be searched, retrieved and combined. Based on English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), formerly titled The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (see description below).

Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 96 complete works of prose fiction from the most canonical authors, English Drama, which contains many plays from the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, and English Poetry are constituent parts of LiON (Literature Online). Click here for a separate LibGuide devoted to the Literature Online database.

A Celebration of Women Writers.

Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers.

Luminarium: An Anthology of English Literature.

The William Blake Archive. Texts and images by William Blake.

See also 18thConnect in the Useful Websites box.

Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Companions, Biography, Chronologies, Etc.

Burwick, Frederick. Romanticism: Keywords. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee, and Diane Long Hoeveler.

A Handbook of Romanticism Studies. Ed. Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wrightl Hoboken, N.J.: WEiley-Blackwell, 2012. Essays on core concepts and scholarly trends.

New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain, 1780s-1830s. Ed. Laura Dabundo. NY: Garland, 1992. Geisel Reference DA 529 .E53 1992

Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancer, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973-1993. 16 volumes. One of the most monumental works of biographical scholarship, this source is still cited in virtually every scholarly monograph devoted to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century stage. Geisel Reference PN 2597 .H5

Garrett, Martin. A Romantics Chronology,1780-1832. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015.

Todd, Janet. A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1985. UCSD's copy is at SRLF; request through the Melvyl record.

British Literature, 1640-1789 by Robert DeMaria
ISBN: 0470654775
Publication Date: 2018-06-18
An indispensable reference for scholars and students of eighteenth-century English literature This addition to the celebrated Wiley-Blackwell Keywords series explores the meanings of fifty-eight of the most important words in British literature of the period 1640-1789. Professor DeMaria focuses on words used with frequency and urgency throughout the works of most major and several minor writers of the British Neoclassical era, with the occasional reach back to the early seventeenth century for a definitive usage found in Francis Bacon, for instance, and look forward to the nineteenth century to the works of Wordsworth, Austen, and Keats. Through discussions of words such as atom, economy, humanity, labor, machine, slavery, society, and system he reveals underlying assumptions about the way writers of the period thought about the physical and social world. Likewise, considerations of words such as happiness, passion, truth, and virtue shed light on the ethical and moral commitments of the age. Unlike dictionaries and many big-data semantics projects, this book brings forth the ambiguities, nuances, and ironies that accrued to word usages during the period through a heightened awareness of the contexts in which they occurred. Highlights and exposes the salient cultural and literary debates and metamorphic moments of cultural thought Reveals an increase in irony and a decrease in allegorical usage as an important trend in the evolution of literary language during the Neoclassical period Stresses the contexts within which words or phrases appear in order to offer a fuller understanding of their meanings and significance than available from digital databases Draws upon a vast compilation of sources from one of the most transformative eras of English literature Rigorous in its scholarship and historical reach, British Literature 1640-1789: Keywords is an indispensable resource which scholars and students of British Neoclassical literature will want to keep close at hand. It is certain to become a fixture of most university reference libraries.

Databases, Secondary Bibliographies, Indexes, and Surveys of Research

Don't forget MLAIB and ABELL!

ECCB: The Eighteenth Century Current Bibliography. New York: AMS Press, 1978-present. This annual, printed bibliography offers interdisciplinary coverage of books, articles, and reviews of scholarship relating to the eighteenth century in Europe and its North and South American colonies. It is slow to appear (i.e., the volume covering 2006 was published in 2011), but still a valuable place to discover fairly recent scholarship on a range of C18 topics. Geisel Reference PR 441 .E4

"Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century." An evaluative survey of the previous year's monographs written by a different distinguished scholar in the field each year, appearing in the summer issue of the journal Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 . Volumes of this journal since 1999 can be found in Project Muse; volumes before 1999 are available in JSTOR -- use the links from the Roger record.

Year's Work in English Studies has chapters on "The Later Seventeenth Century," "The Eighteenth Century," and "Literature 1780-1830: The Romantic Period." All volumes are available online; use the link in the Roger record.

"Annual Bibliography for xxxx." Keats-Shelley Journal. Vol. 1, 1952- present. The volumes up until 3 years ago are available in JSTOR. Volumes for the most recent 3 years are available in print at PR 4836 .A1 K2. An annotated bibliography of studies of British romanticism, with particular comprehensiveness for the second generation of Romantic writers (Keats, both Shelleys, Byron, Hunt, and Hazlitt.).

Letellier, Robert. The English Novel, 1700-1740: An Annotated Biblipgraphy. Greenwood Press, 2002. Annotated bibliography of critical studies of English prose fiction, new editions, anthologies, and bibliographies. Online (limited to one user at a time).

O'Neill, Michael, ed. Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1998. Surveys (by different scholars) on the major authors, groups, and genres. Geisel stacks PR 457 .L58 1998

Jordan, Frank, ed. The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism. 4th edition. NY: MLA, 1985. Geisel stacks PR 590 .E5 1985

Reiman, Donald H. English Romantic Poetry, 1800-1835: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1979. UCSD's copy at SRLF. Request using Melvyl, not Roger.

Fraser, Antonia. Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749-1774 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) and .... 1775-1800 (London: British Library, 1997). Fraser indexes the reviews in 16 (for the first period) and 27 (for the second) periodicals of published poetry, fiction, and drama (not theatrical productions). Geisel Reference Z 1035 .A1 F67 1990 and Z 1035 .A1 F675 1997

Lin, Frederick M. English Drama, 1660-1800: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1976. Geisel stacks PR 701 .L55

Stratman, Carl J., David G. Spencer, and Mary Elizabeth Devine. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research: A Bibliographical Guide, 1900-1968. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Geisel Reference PR 691 .S854 1971

Spector, Robert Donald. The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984. Geisel stacks PR 830 .T3 S66 1984

Nangle, Benjamin Christie. The Monthly Review, First Series, 1748-1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Geisel stacks AP 4 .M8813 Provides article-level indexing to one of the most important literary reviews of the century. UCSD does not have the successor volume covering the years 1790-1815, but it may be borrowed through Melvyl.

Brown, Anthony E. Boswellian Studies: A Bibliography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. Request from SRLF via Melvyl.

Useful Websites

18thConnect. Similar to NINES for the 19th Century, 18thConnect gathers together a community of scholars that shapes the world of digital resources. Its main concerns are: Access via plain-text searching for all scholars to open access and proprietary and digital archives including EEBO and ECCO, even if their institutions are unable to afford those resources; Peer-review of the growing number of digital resources and archives for which 18thConnect offers an online finding aid; Reflection on Best Practices with scholars who are negotiating new modes of publication and scholarly production.

Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians. Selected full texts, images, articles, videos, audio talks, and biographical information from the vast resources of the British Library, as well as links to BL's catalogs and descriptions of its collections and services.

London Lives, 1690-1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis. London Lives makes available, in a fully digitized and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances.

See also Shelley-Godwin Archive in the Full Text Collections box.

Bibliographies & Indexes of Primary Sources

FICTION

Harlin, William. A Check List of English Prose Fiction, 1700-1739. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. Request from SRLF via Melvyl.

Beasley, Jerry C. A Check List of Prose Fiction Published in England, 1740-1749. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Bibliographical Society of Virginia, 1972.Request from SRLF via Melvyl.

Raven, James. British Fiction, 1750-1770: A Chronological Check-list of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1987. Request from SRLF via Melvyl.

The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles. Ed. Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schowerling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 2 volumes. Geisel Reference PR 851 .E52 2000

Sullivan, Alvin, ed. British Literary Magazines. Volume I: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698-1788 and Volume II: The Romantic Age, 1789-1836. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1983. Geisel Reference PN 5124 .L6 B74 1983 v. 1, v. 2.

Although the above four titles are by various compilers and publishers, they essentially form a fairly complete listing of separately published works of fiction pubilshed in England for 130 years. (See The Nineteenth Century page for successor volumes.) They vary in the amount of detail they give for editions other than the first edition and to whether they include chapbooks, tracts, works for young people, etc.

These printed bibliographies should be supplemented with the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC, formerly titled The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue), the most exhaustive bibliographical database of books, serials, pamphlets, broadsides, much printed ephemera (e.g., bookplates), including variant editions, issues, impressions, and variant states, published in the British Isles, British North America, and British territories, or printed in the English language anywhere else in the world between ca. 1473 and 1800. The basis for the major full-text collection ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (see above).

BOOK REVIEWS

Forster, Antonia. Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749-1774. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. And her Index to Book Reviews in England, 1775-1800. Carbondale: SIU, 1997. Geisel Reference Z 1035 .A1 F67 / F675

DRAMA

Burling, William J. A Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage, 1700-1737. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1993. Request via Melvyl.

MANUSCRIPTS

Index of English Literary Manuscripts. London: Mansell; New York: Bowker, 1980- . Volume 2: 1625-1700. 2 vols. Ed. Peter Beal. Volume 3: 1700-1800. Compiled by Margaret M. Smith and Alexander Lindsay. London: Mansell, 1986-1997. 4 volumes. Geisel 7th floor PR 83 .I5

See also the separate page for Manuscripts and Archives.