EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION ON CD-ROM Editorial Board: Judith Hawley, Tom Keymer, John Mullan Chadwyck-Healey Pounds 2,750 +VAT ISBN 0 85964 323 9 Windows CD

Once upon a time, there was a course called "The Eighteenth-Century Novel" in which everyone read Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. Once upon a time, "big" critics wrote "big" books about "big" authors and - with some notable exceptions - nobody paid much attention beyond the "big six".

Today, students are more likely to encounter "Women's Fiction from Behn to Austen", and J. Paul Hunter, arguably the doyen of 18th-century fiction studies, has written an award-winning book on the subject in which the little-known John Dunton is an "extensive presence".

Eighteenth-Century Fiction provides a comprehensive and judicious selection of 18th-century texts which brilliantly meets the needs of contemporary scholars for teaching and research. This CD-Rom offers 77 works by 31 authors, covering the period 1700-80. There are 32 texts by 13 women; the now canonical Sarah Fielding, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox are represented alongside Frances Brooke, Clara Reeve, and Sarah Scott.

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The 45 works by 18 men include a generous selection of 30 texts by the "big six", as well as novels by Henry Brooke, John Hawkesworth, and Robert Paltock. Three works are reproduced in two substantially different editions, enabling the reader to compare two versions of Gulliver's Travels (Motte and Faulkner), Pamela (first version and sixth, including Part II), and Clarissa (first version and third) on a single screen.

Because of Sterne's important typographical manipulations, Tristram Shandy has been both keyed and scanned on to the CD-Rom. Hyperlinks make it easy to move between parallel versions of these texts. Selecting fiction, rather than restricting their choices to novels alone, the editorial board have included shorter works by Penelope Aubin, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, and Mary de la Rivi re Manley; Richardson's Familiar Letters also appears under this broader rubric.

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Even in such an ample collection of texts, however, there are a few disappointing omissions. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Part III, entitled Serious Reflections during the Life . . . of Robinson Crusoe, and Swift's A Tale of a Tub would have been especially welcome.

Readers disconcerted by the absence of Restoration fiction, of Jane Austen or the Jacobin novel, the dearth of gothic fiction, or the fact that Frances Burney is represented solely by Evelina (her only pre-1780 novel) may take comfort from Chadwyck-Healey's plans to issue two similarly comprehensive CD-Rom collections: Early English Prose Fiction, 1475-1700 and Romantic Literature in Context.

Of course, Eighteenth-Century Fiction not only makes many hard-to-find texts available, it also allows scholars and students to search electronically for key words, verbal patterns, or structural features in those texts. I discovered, for example, that "providence" appears 923 times in these works, with 60 "hits" in John Buncle by Thomas Amory, 60 in the sixth edition of Pamela, and 48 in The Spiritual Quixote by Richard Graves. Searching for "girl" or "woman" within five words of "frail" or "weak" revealed 75 matches in 32 different texts. With the click of a button I viewed each "hit" in its context and, where that looked promising, clicked once more to view the full text.

The database is very useful for comparing different editions of the same work: discovering that "child" or "girl" appears 509 times in the first edition of Clarissa and 591 times in the third edition, I was able to trace these changes and discern a pattern in Richardson's revisions.

Using "command line searching" one can find textual features by their electronic tags: there are, for example 115 poems in these novels, Jane Barker's Patch-Work Screen leading the way with 28, and Charlotte Lennox's Harriot Stuart having ten.

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There are three poems in the Faulkner edition of Gulliver's Travels, but none in the Motte edition. Users can browse by author, title, or, most interestingly, more than 20 genre categories-exploring works under "Cervantic fiction", "fantastic voyage", "heroic romance", "Pamela controversy", "political satire", or "scandal chronicle". The editorial board-Judith Hawley, Tom Keymer, and John Mullan-have chosen the particular editions of their texts wisely and well, but the bibliographic information provided for each work is sadly lacking and, on occasion, slightly misleading. There are, for example, no indications of formats, and pagination statements are provided only for single-volume works. Title pages are neither scanned nor transcribed according to any established bibliographical conventions. Moreover, there are no "notes on the text" of the kind we would routinely find in a Penguin or an OUP World's Classic, and readers are offered no explanation of why a particular edition was used or excluded.

Electronic texts, like their printed counterparts, are only as good as their bibliographic reliability. Readers, especially students, should have been informed about what textual issues are at stake for Pamela, or Gulliver, or Crusoe, or Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, the only work for which I would have chosen a different edition.

This product requires a 486 PC with 8 megabytes of RAM running Windows 3.1. It is, alas, not Mac compatible. Installation is easy, access time is good, the manual is helpful, and the text is clear, though the scanned images - including Tristram's marbled page - are less than impressive.

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Since the database may be networked across a single site, Eighteenth-Century Fiction is very well suited for teaching in English, history, and women's studies. It would not be exceptionally difficult to read an entire novel on a high-quality monitor, but will anyone achieve this feat? What is the difference between being a user and being a reader? How does altering the physicality of fiction alter our attitude toward the text and, hence, our response?

Most of us read fiction for the pleasures of plot and character, but scrutinise screens for data. Readers of literature may even find themselves encountering what Martha Nussbaum has elegantly called "love's knowledge", whereas users of literature databases may unwittingly settle for generating information.

One of the potential hazards of these excellent tools for scholarship and learning is that the patterns of their use - typically six minutes in the reference section of a university library - tend to emphasise the "puzzle principle" of literature over the pleasure principle of all art worth our time and consideration.

Using the latest technology to foster creative engagement with a broad spectrum of texts, we need to work toward understanding, the harvest of thoughtful and critical discernment, if knowledge is not to be lost in information. The speed of electronic texts can belie the reality that human understanding takes time.

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Michael Suarez, SJ is a junior research fellow at St John's College, Oxford.