Eighteenth-Century Verse Miscellanies

Abstract

Thousands of verse collections containing the works of multiple authors were published in the 18th century. This essay offers a guide to recent scholarship on these collections of ‘poems by several hands’. It provides an overview of the many different kinds of miscellany and anthology that were produced, before exploring what these publications might reveal about the 18th-century literary landscape. It considers what miscellanies and anthologies contribute to our understanding of authorship and anonymity, genre, canon formation and the literary past, women writers, and regionalism and nationalism. It then investigates what these texts reveal about 18th-century reading practices, and about the workings of the 18th-century book trade. The essay concludes with an account of an important current research project, the Digital Miscellanies Index.