Chronicles the period of transition for the British book trade that saw the emergence of some great manes of the trade, but was also a time when publishing firms most often were still controlled by single individuals who made judgments based on literary merit, political alliances and pressures, friendships, or the prospect of high profits.

The 18th century in Britain was a transition period for literature. Patronage, either by a benefactor or through subscription, lingered even as the publishing and bookselling industries developed. The practice of reviewing books became well established during the second half of the century, with the first periodical founded in 1749. For the literary scholar, these gradual changes mean that different search strategies are required to conduct research into primary and secondary source material across the era. Literary Research and the British Eighteenth Century addresses these unique challenges. It examines how the following all contribute to the richness of literary research for this era: book and periodical publishing; a growing literate society; dissemination of literature through salons, private societies, and coffee houses; the growing importance of book reviews; the explosion of publishing; and the burgeoning of primary source material available through new publishing and digital initiatives in the 21st century. This volume explores primary and secondary resources, including general literary research guides; union library catalogs; print and online bibliographies; scholarly journals; manuscripts and archives; 18th-century books, newspapers, and periodicals; contemporary reception; and electronic texts and journals, as well as Web resources. Each chapter addresses the research methods and tools best used to extract relevant information and compares and evaluates sources, making this book an invaluable guide to any literary scholar and student of the British eighteenth century.

Important revisions to the history of advertising and its connection to Romantic-era literature. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism investigates the entwined histories of the advertising industry and the gradual commodification of literature over the course of the Romantic Century (1750–1850). In this engaging and detailed study, Nicholas Mason argues that the seemingly antagonistic arenas of marketing and literature share a common genealogy and, in many instances, even a symbiotic relationship. Drawing from archival materials such as publishers' account books, merchants' trade cards, and authors' letters, Mason traces the beginnings of many familiar modern advertising methods—including product placement, limited-time offers, and journalistic puffery—to the British book trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until now, Romantic scholars have not fully recognized advertising’s cultural significance or the importance of this period in the origins of modern advertising. Mason explores Lord Byron’s appropriation of branding, Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s experiments in visual marketing, and late-Romantic debates over advertising's claim to be a new branch of the literary arts. Mason uses the antics of Romantic-era advertising to illustrate the profound implications of commercial modernity, both in economic practices governing the book trade and, more broadly, in the development of the modern idea of literature.

Offers a collection of British satire. This three-volume facsimile includes: an introduction, a chronology, volume introductions, endnotes, a biographical appendix, an author index, a first line index and a general index.

"In view of the value placed in Scotland on education, reading, and self-improvement and the enterprise and inventiveness with which the inhabitants of the far poorer northern kingdom responded to the opportunities opened up to them by the Union with England, it is not surprising that Scotsmen were heavily represented in the printing and publishing trades. An altogether disproportionate number of the great publishing houses of the English-speaking world, whose names were to become household words - Blackie, Blackwood, Collins, Constable, Macmillan, Millar, Murray, Nelson, Smith and Elder, Strahan -- were founded by men, often enough of quite humble origin, from "north of the border."--

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in 'low-brow' titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes - inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies - were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women's sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.