Miscellanies, Poetry, and Authorship, 1680–1800

‘Miscellanies, Poetry, and Authorship, 1680–1800 is the first comprehensive study of the miscellany as a quintessentially eighteenth-century print form. Watson demonstrates the new avenues of investigation opened up by resources like the Digital Miscellanies Index, while balancing distant reading with striking case studies of overlooked authors who exploited the form. This is an important contribution to the fields of eighteenth-century literary studies and book history, reorienting what we think we know about poetry, authorship, and the marketing of literature in the period.’

— Betty A. Schellenberg, author of Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790 (2016)

This book is a critical study of the ancestors of contemporary poetry anthologies: the poetic miscellanies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that miscellanies are a distinctive kind of literarycollection and that their popularity in the period 1680–1800 had a far-reaching impact on authors, publishers, and readers of poetry.

This study expands the definition of miscellanies to include single-author collections called miscellanies as well as the multiple-author collections that have traditionally been the focus of scholarly attention. It shows how multiple-author miscellanies fostered different kinds of literary community and explores the neglected role of single-author miscellanies in the self-fashioning of eighteenth-century writers. Later chapters examine miscellanies’ relationships with periodicals, their contribution to the formation of the literary canon, and their reception and transformation in the hands of readers. The book draws on newly available digital data as well as evidence from hundreds of printed miscellanies to shed new light on how poetry was written, published, and read in the long eighteenth century.