For your English 422 papers, you are expected to identify a topic, narrow it down, gain some sense of current discussions in the field about your topic, identify 3-5 outside resources (other than the textbooks from the course), and say something original.  Your paper should also show an awareness of what was going on in the poet's life and  This handout is intended to help you to find and identify important 18th century studies research materials that you that you will need to write a good paper. NKU's Steely Library has some, but not all, of the resources you might need to do current research.

Web Resources
 

• Go to your instructor's literary resources site, which is located at http://www.nku.edu/~rkdrury/literary.html. Click on "Early Art."
• Go to Collage. Find one image that describes some aspect of 18th century life and describe it below.
• Go to the National Portrait Gallery. Search for a portrait of one of the authors we are studying or some other person mentioned by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets. Describe the portrait briefly below.
• Click on the link labeled "William Hogarth and 18th Century Print Culture." Find a print that interests you and describe it briefly.

• Go back to your instructor's literary resources site, which is located at http://www.nku.edu/~rkdrury/literary.html. Click on "Restoration and 18th Century Literature." Then click on the link labeled "C18-L Selected Readings Homepage." Find the "Selected Readings Search Engine." Enter the name of one of the authors we are studying. Read over the titles that come up, and name one topic you notice that appears to be current among scholars in 18th century literature.

• Go back to the "Restoration and 18th Century Literature" page (at http://www.nku.edu/~rkdrury/18th.html).  Under "Texts," click on "Internet Library of Early Journals." When the page comes up, look on the left side of the page and click on the "Browse" link. Click on "Gentlemen's Magazine" or "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society." Click on "Search" in the left hand column. Search on a word.  Describe one of the issues you locate.

• Go back to the "Restoration and 18th Century Literature" page (at http://www.nku.edu/~rkdrury/18th.html). Under "Material Culture," click on the link marked "Clothing." Choose an article or style of clothing and describe what you learn. (The entries on "fans" are particularly interesting)

Library Resources
 

• Go to the library and find an NQUIRE terminal. Search for one of the authors we are studying or one of the authors mentioned in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Identify a work published before 1750 and write down the call number (it will probably begin with "LEL"). Go to the 4th floor Microforms counter and fill out a form. Use the microfiche reader to look at the document. Print out a xerox copy of the document's title page and staple it to this handout.

• While you are on the 4th floor, locate a recent copy of the journal "Eighteenth-Century Studies" (shelved on the periodical shelves in alphabetical order). Find the title of a recent article and write it below.

• The Oxford English Dictionary tracks when words actually entered the language and how the definitions of words change over time.  Many words used in the 18th century meant something different at the time. Looking up words in the OED is one way of making sure you don't misinterpret what an author meant in using a particular word. Find the OED (available in the Reference section on Compact Disk). Look up one of the following words and write down a definition that was unexpected:  projector, mop, rib, sharper.

• The London Stage is an extremely important record of performances and other activities and people associated with the stage in England from 1660 to 1800. Find The London Stage in Steely Library. Look up The Beggar's Opera (1727) or one of the other plays we will read this semester (Three Hours After Marriage [1717] or The What d'Ye Call It [1715]) in the index. Choose one performance and go to the page where that performance is listed. Write below what you learn about that particular performance.

• A concordance tracks the use of a particular word across the works of a writer. Concordances can be useful if you are trying to determine how a particular writer defined or thought about a particular idea or use of language. Using NQUIRE, find the book A Concordance to the poems of Alexander Pope or Concordance to the poems of Jonathan Swift, edited by Michael Shinagel. Find a word one of these poets used often and write it below.

• Knowing what was happening in an author's life when he or she was writing a particular work can provide insight into the writer'swork.  Find George Sherburn's collection of the Correspondence of Alexander Pope or the Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, edited by Harold Williams. Read one of the letters Pope wrote while he was writing Essay on Criticism (around 1709-1711) or that Swift wrote when he was writing Gulliver's Travels (1725-1726). Write below any insight you got from reading this letter.

• Look at a biography of the same author and read about what was happening in the author's life at the same time. Below, write down something about the author's life while he was writing this work.