NB:  All texts hosted here at my site are password-protected; some texts are available only through TTU library's subscription databases; the remainder are texts freely available online.

Eighteenth-century texts

Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld) and John Aikin, "On Romances" and "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror" (1773)
                                                              online text prepared by Michael Gamer at Penn

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing"

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
                          PDF of selected excerpts

Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789)
                             Etext of Volume 1 prepared by the Hanover Historical Texts Project
                             PDF of chapters 2 and 5

Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1725):  online text prepared by Jack Lynch

Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4 (1750)

Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (1759):  online text prepared by Jack Lynch

Hannah More, "Sensibility" (1782): online text prepared by Michael Gamer at Penn
                                                         Annotated text based on Gamer's text (annotated by Dr. Marta Kvande)

Thomas Paine, excerpts from The Rights of Man (1791)

Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789)

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777)
                                            PDF available via MyLiteratureKit for users of the Longman Anthology
                                            Alternate PDF

Mary Wollstonecraft, excerpts from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Periodical selections

Secondary texts

Nancy Armstrong, selections from Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel

Mikhail Bakhtin, selections from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms:  Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740, ch. 2

Janine Barchas, "Sarah Fielding's Dashing Style and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture."  ELH 63.3 (1996): 633-56.

G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility:  Sex and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ch. 1

Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel." Essays in Literature 18 (1991): 151-65.

Toni Bowers, "Sex, Lies, and Invisibility:  Amatory Fiction from the Restoration to Mid-Century."  The Columbia History of the British Novel.  Ed. John Richetti.  New York:  Columbia UP, 1994.  50-72.

Valdine Clemens, The Return of the Repressed, chapter 1

E. J. Clery,  “The Genesis of ‘Gothic’ Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 21-39.
---.  The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800, chapter 1

Margaret Case Croskery, "Masquing Desire: The Politics of Passion in Eliza Haywood's Fantomina." The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work. Ed. Kirsten T. Saxon and Rebecca Bocchicchio. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. 69-94.

Kate Ferguson Ellis, chapter 1 of The Contested Castle:  Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology.  Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.

Margaret J. M. Ezell, chapter 1 of Writing Women's Literary History.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Jan Fergus, "Women Readers:  A Case Study."

Catherine Gallagher, "Nobody's Story:  Gender, Property, and the Rise of the Novel."  Modern Language Quarterly 53.3 (1992): 263-77.

M. O. Grenby,  chapter 1 of The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Convservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Charles Haskell Hinnant, "Ironic Inversion in Eliza Haywood’s Fiction: Fantomina and ‘The History of the Invisible Mistress’.” Women’s Writing 17.3 (2010): 403–412.

Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism:  The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes

Jerrold E. Hogle, "Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture." The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 10-20.

J. Paul Hunter, ch. 2 of  Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Claudia Johnson, introduction to Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s--Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Gary Kelly, introduction to The English Jacobin Novel, 1790-1805

Lawrence Klein, "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction:  Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure."  Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1995): 97-109.

Jonathan Brody Kramnick, "Locke, Haywood, and Consent." ELH 72 (2005):  453-470.

Mary Patricia Martin, "High and Noble Adventures:  Reading the Novel in The Female Quixote."  Novel 31 (1997):  45-62.

Paula McDowell, "Women and the Business of Print"

Robert Miles, "The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic." The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 41-62.

Melissa Mowry, "Eliza Haywood’s Defense of London’s Body Politic."  SEL 43.3 (2003):  645-665.

Alexander Pettit, "Our Fictions and Haywood's Fictions."  Talking Forward, Talking Back:  Critical Dialogues with the Enlightenment.  Ed. Kevin Cope and Rudiger Ahrens.  New York:  AMS, 2002.  145-66.

Tiffany Potter, "The Language of Feminised Sexuality: Gendered Voice in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and Fantomina."  Women's Writing 10.1 (2003):  169-86.

Betty Schellenberg, introduction and chapter 1 of The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1996.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the  Gothic Novel."  PMLA 96 (1981): 255-70.

Kristina Straub, "Frances Burney and the Rise of the Woman Novelist."  The Columbia History of the British Novel.  Ed. John Richetti.  New York:  Columbia UP, 1994.  199-219.

Ashley Tauchert, "Woman in a Maze:  Fantomina, Masquerade, and Female Embodiment."  Women's Writing 7.3 (2000):  469-86.

Helen Thompson, "Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton's The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood's Fantomina, and Feminine Consistency."  Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.2 (2002):  195-214.

Janet Todd, Introduction to The Sign of Angellica:  Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800.  New York:  Columbia UP, 1989.

Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History."  Historical Journal 36.2 (1993):  383-414.

William Warner, Licensing Entertainment, ch. 1

William Warner, “Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain.” The Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 1-22.

Ian Watt, chapter 1 of The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.

Ioan Williams, ed., selections from Novel and Romance, 1700-1800. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1970.