Primary texts
In David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, eds, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Titles marked # to be read separately in the specified editions. The three Spectator essays and Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe are widely anthologized (e.g., in The Norton Anthology of English Literature); students can easily find these texts. Mac Flecknoe is also available on LION Database, and good e-texts for the full run of The Spectator are available at The Spectator Project (Montclare Stare University) website, http://meta.montclair.edu/spectator/
John Dryden (1631—1700) Mac Flecknoe (written 1676 and circulated in manuscript, published anonymously 1682). The best annotated text is in Dryden, Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (London: Longman, 2007, paperback).
Jonathan Swift (1667—1745) # Gulliver’s Travels # (1726), ed. Albert J. Rivero. Norton Critical Edition, 2002
Joseph Addison (1672—1719) and Richard Steele (1672—1729) The Spectator nos 1, 2 and 10 (1, 2, and 12 March 1711, respectively)
John Gay (1685—1732) Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), Book II # The Beggar’s Opera # (1728), ed. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell. Penguin Classics, 1986
Alexander Pope (1688—1744) The Dunciad (1743), Book I
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689—1762) and John, Baron Hervey (1696—1743) Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace (1733)
John Dyer (1699—1757) The Fleece (1757), Book III
Samuel Johnson (1709—84) ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ (1783)
Thomas Gray (1716—71) Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
Mary Leapor (1722—46) ‘Crumble Hall’ (1751)
William Cowper (1731—1800) The Task, Book I (1785)
Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1734—74) The Deserted Village (1770)
Charlotte Smith (1749—1806) Beachy Head (1807) [available on LION Database; printed texts in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford, 1993, currently in print) and Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)]
Jane Austen (1775—1817) # Northanger Abbey # (written 1798, published 1818), ed. Susan Fraiman. Norton Critical Edition, 2004.
Textbooks
Paul Goring, Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (London: Continuum, 2008)
David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700-1789 (London: Longman, 2003)
James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700—1789, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1993)