Introduces general reference books, ready-reference guides, guides to manuscripts and dissertations, computer databases, and resources in rhetoric and composition.

The British Romantic era (ca. 1775-1830) was a time of contradictions, of growth, and of diversity in all aspects of English life. "Romanticism" originally referred to the works of six male poets: Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron. However, current scholarly attempts to demonstrate that the period encompasses a rich and varied range of poets, essayists, and novelists of both genders have caused the definition to come under debate. Not limiting itself to these six figures, Literary Research and the British Romantic Era discusses English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh resources for both primary and secondary research within the Romantic Era, including general literary research guides; union library catalogs; print and online bibliographies; manuscripts and archives; microfilm and digitization projects; eighteenth and nineteenth century journals and newspapers; contemporary reviews; and electronic texts, journals, and Web resources. Each chapter addresses the best methods to extract relevant information from the research tools employed, enabling scholars to find relevant materials. The strengths and weakness of core and specialized electronic and print research tools and standard search techniques are also examined.

The English poet Charles Lamb (1775-1834) stimulates reactions that often lie outside the boundaries of literary criticism, reactions that are often motivated by ideological, cultural or political concerns. He poses particularly difficult, even unanswerable, questions that often provoke intemperate anger or great affection in readers. Historically, the first critical misunderstanding of Lamb is to see him as a radical; later he is canonized a domestic saint; in the 1930s he is a reactionary bourgeois. More recently, he is understood as a conscious artist; first, by New Critics as a transcendent optimist, then, in the post-structuralist version, as a tormented soul creating his artifice out of the limitations of human life. This study, a comprehensive history of reactions to Lamb, proposes that perhaps Lamb is a literary 'trickster' who delights in raising just those contradictions of modern life which thosewho attempt a systematic style of criticism would like to ignore.