LibGuides: English: which resources do I use?: 18th Century

Resources

To find material from the 18th century, try searching the resources below:

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online This link opens in a new window Full text major works of poetry, prose and drama. Classical Latin and Greek literature, plus literature from the 15th to the 19th centuries are included. Read major works of literature online alongside explanatory notes and details of variations in the text.
ProQuest One Literature - Incorporating Literature Online This link opens in a new window Collection of 20th Century English Poetry, 20th Century Drama, 20th Century American Poetry literature, literary criticism, and reference works.

For help using these resources, see the guides on this page.

Other resources include:

British Periodicals I, II, III and IV. This link opens in a new window Searchable facsimile reproductions of British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries.
Defining Gender This link opens in a new window UK primary source materials from 1450 to 1910 relating to the study of history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective. Documents include ephemera, pamphlets & periodicals, education documents, books, personal writings, business records, government papers, ballads and literature.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window Full text digital versions of over 180,000 works published during the 18th Century. The collection includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more, reflecting the social, cultural and literary history of the time.
Eighteenth Century Drama This link opens in a new window An archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents, including playbills, theatre records and correspondence that provide social context.
Eighteenth Century Fiction This link opens in a new window English fiction from 1700 to 1780. Including works by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift.
Eighteenth Century Journals This link opens in a new window Bringing together rare journals printed between c.1685 and 1835, this resource illuminates all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life.
Grand Tour This link opens in a new window Taking the phenomenon of the Grand Tour as a starting point, this resource explores the relationship between Britain and Europe from c.1550 to 1850, exploring the Anglo-European response to continental travel for pleasure, business and diplomacy.
Literary Manuscripts - Leeds This link opens in a new window This resource offers literary scholars the opportunity to examine manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds.
Literary Studies This link opens in a new window This collection covers British and American literature including Literary manuscripts, rare printed works, and personal papers of a range of leading literary figures, as well as unique access to rare and obscure literary texts and genres.
London Low Life This link opens in a new window Digitised images of books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century street life culture in London.
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape This link opens in a new window Discover the working methods of Romantic poets and trace the evolution of celebrated verse. Presenting the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust. Includes verse manuscripts, printed manuscripts, prose manuscripts, printed verse, correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps. Content spans from the 17th century to the 1980s.

ProQuest One Literature/Literature Online: search by literary period or movement

ProQuest One Literature - Incorporating Literature Online This link opens in a new window Collection of 20th Century English Poetry, 20th Century Drama, 20th Century American Poetry literature, literary criticism, and reference works.

When searching ProQuest One Literature, you can refine your search by literary period.

Click on Advanced Search and choose Primary Texts on the left side of the page.

Click on Look up Literary Periods.

Either search for Eighteenth Century or browse alphabetically and select Eighteenth Century, 1700-1799 and add to search.

You can add additional keywords and author details if you like, or just click Search to see everything under this category in the database.

Alternatively you could search by literary movement, if applicable, e.g. Gothic novel (1764-c1820) or Romanticism (1780-1837). Click on Look up literary movement to select from a list.

ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) contains over 180,000 titles printed between 1701 and 1800.

ECCO is a digitization of the eighteenth-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC).

Within ECCO you can find a wide variety of documents including encylopedia, dictionaries, poetry, novels, histories, biographies, plays, tracts and sermons, letters, journals, diaries, religious books, works of science, philosophy and theology, schoolbooks, petitions and more.

Perform a basic search using the search box on the homepage.

The keywords you enter will be searched for within the text of the items in the collection, and in the subject tags that have been applied to them.

You will likely want to refine and filter your results after this initial search. You can do this from the search results page, or go to the Advanced Search to refine your search from the start.

For more information, see Gale's help guide.

In the advanced search you can search for multiple keywords. Use the different lines to combine your keywords.

Additionally, you can choose the field in which your terms are searched. This defaults to Keyword, but you can choose other fields such as Entire document, Title, Author, Publisher, Subject and so on.

Further options underneath the search boxes allow you to refine by publication date and language.

Select the Allow variations box to include variations in 18th century spelling and letter forms.

For more information, see Gale's help guide.

Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases. The search engine will look for the words within the quotation marks, in that order.

E.g. A search for women's rights will consider each term separately - it will find documents with both words, but not necessarily together.

"women's rights" will find documents with women's and rights next to each other in that order.

This technique can be used to find terms within a set distance of each other.

You can use the Nn 'Near' operator to do this.

For example:

women's n5 rights will find documents that contain both the terms within five or fewer words of each other.

Look up a particular author using the Browse Author list.

Click on the title of one of your results to see more information and read the text.

The panel on the left offers options to enable you to work with your search results.

Choose View options to switch between Image, Both Text and Image, or Text Only. The Text and Image option will allow you to see the original alongside the transcribed text.

View full citation will give you more details about the document, such as publication date, type, length, publication location, title and author, and where the original has been sourced from.

Explore will link you to documents in related subject areas.

View Gale's help guide for further information on using ECCO.