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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.