Literatures in English - Eighteenth Century

Catalogs

_ESTC: English Short Title Catalog (through the British Library)
The English Short Title Catalogue provides extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language—as well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world. Coverage is from the beginnings of print to 1800 including all recorded English monographs printed between 1475 and 1700.

Dictionaries

The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
The Oxford Companion to American Literature
The Oxford Companion to English Literature
OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Full Text Resources

American Drama (1714-1915)
A growing collection of full-text American dramatic literature, from the colonial period to the present.

American Periodical Series 1740-1900
Digitized images of articles from over 1100 American periodicals published between 1741 and 1900.

American Poetry Full-Text Database
Fully searchable and browsable database of American poetry, including over 35,000 poems by more than 200 American poets. Also covered are six landmark anthologies of American poetry.

Bible in English (990-1970)
The Bible in English contains twenty versions of the Bible. In addition to the twelve complete Bibles, there are five New Testament works, two Gospel works and William Tyndale's New Testament, Pentateuch and Jonah translations. For scholars of English literature, particular attention has been given to the Renaissance period. All the most significant texts from Tyndale to the King James Bible, including the highly influential Coverdale, Bishops' and Geneva Bibles, appear. For researchers in the development of the English language, texts from all eras are included, with emphasis upon versions that closely represent its contemporary state. For biblical and theological scholars, texts from the Protestant, Roman Catholic and non-conformist traditions are represented. The complete English text of each edition is included, with all prefatory matter, notes, running heads and glossaries. Each individual text may be browsed, or you may search on keywords within a particular time period, book, version or testament.

Burney Collection Newspapers
Searchable full-text access to the British Library’s collection of the newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817)­the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media. More than twelve hundred titles and almost one million pages are included.

Documenting the American South
A digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture from the 17th century through 1922. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Early American Fiction 1789-1875
Full text of 634 first editions of American novels and short stories written before 1875.

Early English Prose Fiction 1500-1700
Includes over 200 complete works of fictional prose by writers from the British Isles. The entire text of each work is presented, including prefatory matter, author annotations, illustrations, contents pages, appendices, dedications, and errata. Users may search by author, title, keyword, gender of the author, and by publication date.

Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO)
Full-text searchable facsimile page displays of approximately 24,000 books published in Britain and its colonies during the 18th century. When completed, 150,000 18th century works in all disciplines will be in the collection.

Eighteenth Century Fiction 1700-1780
Contains more than 75 works in English prose by writers from the British Isles. Texts include a scanned version of Sterne's Tristam Shandy, and two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Eighteenth Century Journals II
This full-text collection contains journals (NOT available through Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO)), owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, many of them not held by the British Library. Topics covered are extremely wide-ranging and include literature, the theatre, the origins and rise of romanticism, politics, revolution and rebellion, social issues, gender, and religion.

Eighteenth Century: Past Masters
Correspondence of important figures in eighteenth century England, inlcuding Edmond Halley, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Humfrey Wanley, Joseph Addison, Edward Young, John Gay, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Richardson, Philip Dormer Stanhope (Earl of Chesterfield), Henry and Sarah Fielding, Laurence Stern, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, Tobias Smollett, Edmund Burke, William Cowper, William Johnston Temple, James Boswell, William Jones and Richard Sheridan.

English Poetry Database 600-1900
Virtually the entire canon of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to 1900; in all more than 165,000 poems by 1,250 poets drawn from 4,500 printed sources. Users may search by keywords and may employ Boolean operators. A complete, searchable bibliography of contained works is also available. Certain categories of material have been excluded from the database: translations into English verse after 1800, hymns published after 1800, works in languages other than English, verse drama intended for the stage, and poems never published or only published in contemporary newspapers, journals or miscellanies.

 English Prose Drama (PhiloLogic)
Plays published in English prose from the early 16th century to the end of the 19th century, covering over 1600 works.

English Verse Drama 2000 works 13th century through 19th century
More than 2,000 works by around 450 named authors and approximately 230 anonymous works. English Verse Drama contains works acted on or intended for the stage, which are either wholly or predominantly in verse. Masques, entertainments, translations and adaptations are included, along with certain closet dramas omitted from the English Poetry Full-Text Database. The entire text of each verse drama is included.

Evans Digital Edition
Page images and searchable ASCII text from the microform set Early American Imprints, Series I, based on Charles Evans' American Bibliography.

Literary Theory
Key texts from the history of literary theory and criticism.

Women Writers Online. Texts from 1400-1850.
Women Writers Online is a service of the Brown University Women Writers Project. The texts cover a period from 1400 to 1850. This collection includes a significant number of texts from Renaissance and Restoration England. Another focus are women writers of the Romantic period. All of these texts can be browsed, searched (individually or collectively), and read conveniently online. SGML tagging supports very detailed analysis.

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Indexes/Bibliographies of Journal Articles and Books

ABELL: Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
ABELL includes more than 700,000 bibliographic records in English and other European languages comprising scholarship on the English language, literature, bibliography, and traditional culture of the English-speaking world.

Arts and Humanities Citation Index
Available through Web of Science (Comes up as an option at the bottom of the opening screen)

Humanities Abstracts
Bibliographic citations from more than 450 periodicals in topics such as archaeology, art, classics, film, folklore, journalism, linguistics, music, the performing arts, philosophy, religion, world history, and world literature. Records added since 1994 have abstracts, and many citations have links to the full text of the article. Humanities Abstracts is searchable by keyword, author, title, and a variety of other fields. Articles in periodicals not held by NU libraries may be requested online through the Interlibrary Loan Deparment using the 'ILL' button at the top of the screen.

Humanities International Index
Humanities International Index is a comprehensive database covering journals, books and other important reference sources in the humanities. Humanities International Index provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting for over 1,700 journals and contains more than 1.6 million records. The database includes all data from American Humanities Index plus bibliographic records from a multitude of international journals, books and reference works. This database provides citations and abstracts for articles, essays and reviews, as well as original creative works including poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations. Humanities International Index is a unique, essential collection for comprehensive coverage of the humanities.

Index to English Literary Periodicals 1681-1941
The English Literary Periodicals series consists of 233 titles published during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. While primarily literary in focus, these periodicals deal with a wide variety of subjects and thus offer the historian or scholar valuable resource material not only in the area of literature, but on such topics as theater, art, music, history, politics, sociology, philosophy, economics, religion and science. Of special interest is the English slant on life in America and particularly the American Revolution.

MLA
The MLA International Bibliography consists of bibliographic records pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. The database provides access to scholarly research in nearly 4,000 journals and series. It also covers relevant monographs, working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats. Users may search or browse by author, title, subject and by several other fields using the 'Search Builder' feature. In addition, searches may be limited by language, publication type and publication year or range of years. The database includes a searchable thesaurus, and allows subject searches to be focused using 'role indicators' and 'subfield codes.'

Reference - Quick Lookups

Biography Resource Center

Literature Resource Center

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford Reference Online:

• The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
• A Dictionary of Shakespeare
• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English
• A Dictionary of Writers and their Works

XREFERPLUS:

• Dictionary of Shakespeare, Peter Collin Publishing
• The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature
• The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
• The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story