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.

Predominantly conservative construal of Shakespeare’s politics in the 19th and early twentieth century was followed by a pervasive emphasis upon his allegedly unalignable ambiguation: a conclusion largely undisturbed by New Historicist and Post-Structuralist approaches. The discovery by major Left critics in the 1960s and 1980s of a populist Shakespeare, radical in critiques of power, effected curiously little impact upon that governing paradigm. Recognition of Shakespeare’s radicalism has subsequently begun emerging sporadically, incrementally, and almost involuntarily. Such revaluations draw strength, however, from fuller historical study of Shakespeare’s world, recognising both the radical social distress of the 1590s, and the Elizabethan inheritance of multiple lines of Tudor political dissent.

Inaugurated some thirty years ago, the massive resurgence of scholarly interest in nineteenth-century Spiritualism – a once-derided heterodox movement which offered believers the opportunity to speak with the dead – continues to gain momentum as we reach the second decade of the twenty-first century. This article examines how twenty-first century feminist, cultural studies, post-structuralist, and periodical studies approaches to the movement develop and differ from those of both its nineteen-eighties recoverers and indeed its nineteenth-century practitioners and adherents. What is at stake, intellectually, politically, and ethically, in the ways in which contemporary critics now interrogate and align transatlantic practices of mediumship and séance communication? In particular, I trace the growing challenge to the long-ubiquitous and near-exclusive emphasis on the movement’s feminist and proleptically radical dimensions, one which, however laudable in its progressive ambitions, has nonetheless tended to over-homogenize Spiritualism’s chaotically diverse political and philosophical identifications and to sometimes skew our understanding of its constituency. Recent moves to republish and digitize rare works from the transatlantic Spiritualist archive have the potential to remedy this situation, not by installing an univocal Ur-meaning for the movement, but by revealing new areas of dynamic tension and cross-fertilization within it.

The paper deals with some of the translations and adaptations of Gitagovinda, a 12th century Sanskrit text, in the late 18th and 19th century Bengal. These translations and derivative adaptations were shaped by the colonial experience in Bengal and reveal important strands of colonial discourse and exchange. The English translation of the text by William Jones (in 1789), the famed philologist and the founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, served as one of the seminal texts of Orientalist exploration in South Asia. Also discussed in the paper are Rasamaya Dasa’s Bengali translation of Gitagovinda (published in 1817) and the several adaptations of the text published by the Battala printers. The ambivalence about eroticism in the text has been discussed, along with the subsequent histories of the text as a cultural commodity in colonial Bengal.