LibGuides: Eighteenth-Century Studies: Online Resources: 7. British literature

7. British literature

Early English Prose Fiction This link opens in a new window
The texts of Early English Prose Fiction are essential to understand the development of narrative in English. What came to be recognised as the dominant characteristic of English fiction, realism, was only one of a rich diversity of approaches in fiction?s early years. The collection shows the evolution of English prose, covering the change from a predominantly oral culture, where prose fiction can be understood as "written speech", to a literary culture dependent on strictly literary conventions...
Eighteenth-Century Fiction This link opens in a new window
Eighteenth-Century Fiction brings together 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700 - 1780 by writers from the British Isles. It is the largest collection of literature from the period available in electronic form.
English Drama This link opens in a new window
English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas. In addition to works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge, English Drama includes the dramatic writings of many more neglected writers long inaccessible in print form. A full list of works included in the collection is given in the bibliography.
English Poetry Database This link opens in a new window
The Database consists of the works of almost 1,350 poets from 600-1900. Certain categories of material have been excluded from the database: translations into English verse 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 Poetry (2nd edition) This link opens in a new window
English Poetry, Second Edition redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection with enhanced functionality and the addition of more than 20,000 poems.
Literary Manuscripts Leeds This link opens in a new window
Focus of collection is to provide access to facsimile images of verses as catalogued in the University of Leeds Brotherton Library’s BCMSV database, with full texts. Content is poems from 17th and 18th centuries. Many of the Mss are miscellanies and commonplace books, not indexed previously. The Brotherton Collection was a private library assembled by Lord Brotherton of Wakefield, 1856-1930, founder of the largest chemical manufacturing company in Britain, MP, Mayor of Wakefield, and Lord Mayor of Leeds with his nephew’s wife Dorothy Una Ratcliffe.
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape This link opens in a new window
Contains manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust: notebooks, some printed annotated editions, verse manuscripts, diaries, travel journals, scrapbooks, autograph books, financial records/receipts, art works (Constable, Turner, Gainsborough, Haydon, Ruskin), and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, useful for studying interactions of key literary and political figures of the 18th and 19th centuries. Also has 18th and 19th century maps of and guidebooks to the English Lake District from the digital collection of Martin and Jean Norgate.

Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage

Contains the Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library, including every play submitted for license from 1737-1824. Also hundreds of documents that provide social context, such as playbills, correspondence of major theatrical figures, set designs, actor portraits, financial and legal documents surround the business of theaters and two fully searchable, essential, multi-volume, formerly only print directories: The London Stage 1660-1800 and A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1600-1800.

Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts

Contains some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. Unlike the famous printed novels, all published in a short span between 1811 and 1818, these manuscripts trace Jane Austen’s development as a writer from childhood to the year of her death; that is, from 1787 (aged 11 or 12) to 1817 (aged 41). These pages represent one of the earliest collections of creative writings in the author’s hand to survive for a British novelist.

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Eighteenth-Century Studies: Online Resources: 7. British literature

7. British literature