A. PRIMARY TEXTS. Poems in David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, eds, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Texts marked by an asterisk (*) are to be found in the new Unipub course compendium available from Akademika. Underlined titles are to be bought separately in the specified editions.
Joseph Addison (1672—1719) and Richard Steele (1672—1729)*16 Spectator essays (1711—12) listed by periodical number and topic:
- 1 Mr Spectator (Addison)
- 2 Introducing the Spectator Club (Steele)
- 3 The allegory of Public Credit (Addison)
- 5 On Italian opera (Addison)
- 10 The aims of The Spectator (Addison)
- 49 On coffee-houses (Steele)
- 50 The four Iroquois sachems (Addison)
- 69 The Royal Exchange (Addison)
- 70 On native literary genius: the ballad of Chevy Chase (Addison)
- 71 A sevant’s billet-doux (Addison)
- 101 On the posterity of The Spectator (Addison)
- 106 Sir Roger de Coverley’s country house (Addison)
- 119 On town and country manners (Addison)
- 411—14 On the pleasures of the imagination (Addison)
Alexander Pope (1688—1744)
- The Dunciad (1743), Book I
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689—1762)
- ‘Saturday. The Small-Pox. Flavia’ (1716)
Daniel Defoe (1660—1731)
- Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Michael Shinagel, Norton Critical Edition, 1994
Jonathan Swift (1667—1745)
- Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ed. Albert J. Rivero, Norton Critical Edition, 2002
John Gay (1685—1732)
- The Beggar’s Opera (1728), ed. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell, Penguin Classics, 1986
John Dyer (1699—1757)
- The Fleece (1757), Book III
James Thomson (1700—48)
- *A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton (1727)
Stephen Duck (1705—56)
- The Thresher’s Labour (1730)
Mary Collier (1690?—c. 1762)
- The Woman’s Labour (1739)
Thomas Gray (1716—71)
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1730—74)
- The Deserted Village (1770)
William Cowper (1731—1800)
- Yardley Oak (1791)
B. TEXTBOOK (obligatory reading):
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997, rpt. Perennial, October 2004), Introduction, chapters 1—4 and part of 11 (on The Beggar’s Opera), pp. xv—xxx, 3—197, 427—49.
Recommended supplementary (not obligatory) reading (‘survey’ textbooks on relevant aspects of the period):
J. A. Downie, To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678—1750 (London: Macmillan, 1994)
James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700—1789, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1993)
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000)
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, rev. 1990)
David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700—1789 (London: Longman, 2003)
Margaret Ann Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660—1780, Routledge History of English Poetry vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)
W. A. Speck, Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology, Politics and Culture 1680—1820 (London and New York: Longman, 1998)