Useful Resources and More Information

Someone in class today asked about the rules for commas; after class someone else confessed ignorance about split infinitives. An excellent resource for these and other grammar and writing questions is The Tongue Untied (full disclosure: a friend of mine runs the site). Closer to home, UIUC has a similar but less comprehensive Writer's Resources site at the Center for Writing Studies.

As we discussed (in class on Monday) the particular writers each of you is thinking of working on, someone asked about how to find further information about them. In many cases, there simply may not be a lot of information. Of those mentioned in class today, Susannah Centlivre and Ann Yearsley have received a lot of critical attention, the others have received little. For most of you, the research you do in this course, will not be the kind of summary and synthesis of critical/secondary sources that would be necessary if you were writing about a more prominent writer--but that's partly the point! The research you'll be doing is largely primary research: looking at the texts that your writer wrote and using those as the basis of your critical work.

That said, you will need to identify what, if anything, is known about your poet. The index, footnotes, and bibliography to Backscheider are a great place to start. There are also two good print resources: Roger Lonsdale's anthology, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets has carefully researched write-ups of all the women included in the anthology, and Janet Todd's Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660 - 1800 is also an excellent resource.

As some of you have already discovered, a Google search is not particularly helpful, particularly as many of these poets have fairly common names. The UIUC Library site has more to offer: the Literature Resource Center may have information on your poet. The Dictionary of National Biography (online) can help you learn more about figures who get addressed or alluded to in the poems you are reading. There is also the MLA (Modern Language Association) database, which indexes every literary-critical publication. If scholarly journal articles have been published about your poet, they will be in the MLA database, sometimes with a link to the full text.

Finally, by all means avail yourself of the librarians in the English Library on the 3rd floor of the UIUC library. They are smart, kind, and deeply knowledgeable--I have routinely found that asking them for help saves me a lot of time. Among other things, they are very good at shaking information out of MLA. The search engine is sort-of-self-explanatory, but they know lots of tricks for getting it to work more effectively.

I also have things to say about the Rare Book Library--but I'll save them for class.

Feel free to post questions, problems, concerns relating to the research process here.