Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Blazing World (1666)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; The Fair Jilt; (1688)
Delarivier Manley, from The New Atalantis (1709), The Wife’s Resentment (1720)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Eliza Haywood, Love In Excess (1719-20) or Fantomina (1724)
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722) or Roxana (1724)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740-1) or Clarissa (1747-8)
Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749)
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752)
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67), A Sentimental Journey (1768)
Frances Sheridan, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)
Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771)
Frances Burney, Evelina (1778)
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (1788), Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798)
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791)
William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794 ) or The Italian (1797)
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801)
Recommended Secondary Texts
o Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
o Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England
o Ros Ballaster, Seductive Fictions: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740
o Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760
---, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature
o John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England
o Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture & Fiction (Methuen, 1986).
o James Clifford (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism
o Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered
o Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape
o Moira Ferguson, Subject To Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834
o Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke
o Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820
James E. Gill, ed. Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire (Tennessee, 1995).
o Donald Greene, The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century Literature
o George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century
o Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy
o Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn
o Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century
o J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: the Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
o Heidi Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism
o Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s
o Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature
o Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print
o Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics
o Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England
o ---, The Origins of English Novel, 1600-1740
o Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: a Revolution in Literary Style
o Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel
o John Mulllan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century
o Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660-1750
o ---, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives
o Felicity Nussbaum & Laura Brown (eds.), The New 18thCentury: Theory•Politics•English Literature
o Deborah C. Payne & J. Douglas Canfield (eds.), Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater
o Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope
o Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as STyle in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
* Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper
o Katharine Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth Century England
o Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
o John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England
o Patricia Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels
o Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
o Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration
o Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology
o James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry
o Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800
o ---, Sensibility: An Introduction
o Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism
o William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750
o Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
o Harold Weinbrot, Brittania’s Issue: the Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian
o G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Britain
o Jeremy Black and Roy Porter (eds.), The Penguin Dictionary of Eighteenth Century History (A very useful resource containing a year-by-year chronology, maps, dynastic charts, and a list for further reading.)
o John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth-Century
o Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837
o R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972
o Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714
o ---, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution
o Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
o C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke
o J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century [1714-1815]
o Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century [1688-1802] (*This is the standard, short introductory social history to the period and an excellent place to start.)
o ---, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment
o Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833
o Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800
o Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume One: Heterosexuality and Third Gender in Enlightenment London
o Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
o Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785
Good Starting Points
Be sure to consult the recent and forthcoming series of Cambridge Companions, especially those devoted to English Literature 1650-1740 (ed. Steven N. Zwicker), English Restoration Theater (ed. Deborah Payne Fisk), The Eighteenth Century Novel (ed. John Richetti), and Eighteenth Century Poetry (ed. John Sitter)—all contain good essays on a variety of central authors and topics. (Volumes devoted to the Gothic, to individual writers like Swift and Wollstonecraft, as well as others, are planned.) The Blackwell Companions to Restoration Drama (ed. Sue Owen), British Literature 1640-1789: A Critical Reader (ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr.), and the Gothic (ed. David Punter) are also very useful. Michael McKeon’s new Theory of the Novel is a superb and comprehensive collection of theory and criticism on its subject.