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

This page lists sources that cover multiple periods, genres, and/or nationalities. See additional resources in the "Historical Literary Period" and "Geographical Region" pages.

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). For further information, see the 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 2nd Fl. West Reference-High Use Shelves 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. Open Access available via HathiTrust..

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 it through interlibrary loan by clicking the UC Library Search link above, signing in and using the Request feature.

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.