This volume discusses traditional and new resources for researching British literature of the Victorian and Edwardian ages and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

Literary Research and Irish Literature: Strategies & Sources explores primary and secondary research resources relevant to the study of Irish literary authors, works, genres, and history. Sources covered include general literary research guides; union library catalogs; print and online bibliographies; manuscripts and archives; microfilm and digitization projects; scholarly journals; periodicals, newspapers, and reviews; and electronic and Web resources. To ease comparison and evaluation of references, each chapter addresses how to choose and utilize research methods and tools to yield the most relevant information. This guide also examines the strengths and weaknesses of core and specialized electronic and print research tools and standard search techniques and_when appropriate_covers the historical and cultural contexts and usability issues of unique reference sources. This volume, number 5 in the series, raises trenchant issues in Irish literary scholarship, such as the problem of defining what Irish literature is; gaps in criticism and secondary literature devoted to Irish literature; neglected areas of scholarly inquiry, including Irish literature by women and lesser-known writers; and the rewards of interdisciplinary research. It concludes with a brief consideration of a scenario illustrating how a scholar might use strategies and sources covered in the text to solve a research problem.

This guide provides the best practices and reference resources, both print and electronic, that can be used in conducting research on literature of the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period. This volume seeks to address specific research characteristics integral to studying the period, including a more inclusive canon and the predominance of Shakespeare.

A juvenile tradition of young writers flourished in Britain between 1750-1835. Canonical Romantic poets as well as now-unknown youthful writers published as teenagers. These teenage writers reflected on their literary juvenilia by using the trope of prolepsis to assert their writing as a literary tradition. Precocious writing, child prodigies, and early genius had been topics of interest since the eighteenth century. Child authors—girl poets and boy poets, schoolboy writers and undergraduate writers, juvenile authors of all kinds—found new publication opportunities because of major shifts in the periodical press, publishing, and education. School magazines and popular juvenile magazines that awarded prizes to child writers all made youthful authorship more visible. Some historians estimate that minors (children and teens) comprised over half the population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Modern interest in Romanticism, and the self-taught and women writers' traditions, has occluded the tradition of juvenile writers. This first full-length study to recover the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century juvenile tradition draws on the history of childhood and child studies, along with reception study and audience history. It considers the literary juvenilia of Thomas Chatterton, Henry Kirke White, Robert Southey, Leigh Hunt, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans (then Felicia Dorothea Browne)-along with the childhood writing of Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and John Keats-and a score of other young poets- "infant bards "-no longer familiar today. Recovering juvenility recasts literary history. Adolescent writers, acting proleptically, ignored the assumptions of childhood development and the disparagement of supposedly immature writing.

In 1714, king George I ushered in a remarkable 123-year period of energy that changed the face of Britain and ultimately had a profound effect on the modern era. The pioneers of modern capitalism, industry, democracy, literature, and even architecture flourished during this time and their innovations and influence spread throughout the British empire, including the United States. Now this rich cultural period in Britain is effectively surveyed and summarized for quick reference in a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia, which contains entries by British, Canadian, American, and Australian scholars specializing in everything from finance and the fine arts to politics and patent law. More than 380 illustrations, mostly rare engravings, enhance the coverage, which runs the whole gamut of political, economic, literary, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and social life, and spotlights some 600 prominent individuals and families.