Selected American Literature Online Resources

Databases
(*Licensed by Rhodes College)

*360Search
360Search will simultaneously search a number of databases that contain literature related sources.

*America′s Historical Newspapers (1758 - 1900)
Offers several hundred thousand fully searchable issues from more than 200 significant 18th- and 19th- century newspapers from all 50 present states.

• *American Film Scripts Online
  Contains 823 scripts by 969 writers together with detailed, fielded information on the scenes, characters and people related to the scripts. In addition, the database includes over 430 original images of previously unpublished screenplays. When complete, the collection will include more than 1,000 scripts and over 100,000 scenes of life as portrayed in the movies.
• *American National Biography
  Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life -- whose lives have shaped the nation.
• *Asian American Drama
  Contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
• *Black Drama
  Contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
• *Black Thought and Culture: African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
  When complete, Black Thought and Culture will provide approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art.
• *Latino Literature
  Brings together more than 100,000 pages of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latin authors working in the United States. Researchers will also find numerous Chicano folk tales and audio files of selected poems and plays.
• *Literature Resource Center
  Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Combining Gale Group′s core literary databases in a single online service, the Literature Resource Center covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors.
• *LitFinder
  Search the full-text of over 125,000 poems and thousands of stories, essays, plays and speeches. Also includes biographical information, poetry explications, etc.
• *MLA International Bibliography
  Produced by the Modern Language Association of America, this database consists of bibliographic records pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, and folklore, and includes coverage from 1963 to the present. The MLA International Bibliography provides access to scholarly research in over 3,000 journals and series. It also covers relevant monographs, working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats.
• *North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries & Oral Histories
  Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides arich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants.
• *North American Theatre Online
  A comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. It includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to more than 30,000 plays, over 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, nearly 22,000 productions and 2,500 production companies. The file also includes some 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.
• *North American Women′s Letters & Diaries (Colonial Period - 1950)
  Includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters dating from the colonial period to 1950.
• *Oxford African American Studies Center (AASC)
  The Oxford African American Studies Center provides students, teachers, and scholars with an authoritative and comprehensive source on the African American experience. At launch, the site will be comprised of five major encyclopedias and content from eighteen additional reference sources from Oxford University Press. The site includes a carefully selected editorial program of supplementary material. This includes approximately 100 primary source documents with commentaries, G1,000 images with an ongoing image research program, over 200 charts, tables and graphs, maps, timelines, and learning resources for students and teachers.
• *Southern Life
  Contains nearly 5 million full-text articles on topics that relate directly to Southern living, both past and present, including people, places, historical events and more.
• *Twentieth Century North American Drama
  Contains 1,122 plays by 170 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
• *Wilson OmniFile Full Text, Mega Edition (1982 -)
  Electronic access to full text articles, page images, article abstracts, and citations from over 4,000 journals. Coverage back as early as 1982 ensures that every search is as deep as it is broad. Includes Humanities Full Text, Reader′s Guide Full Text.
• *Women Writers Online
  Part of the Brown University Women Writers Project, the goal of this database is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.
• *WorldCat
  The world′s most comprehensive bibliography, with more than 42 million bibliographic records representing 400 languages. Covers information back to the 11th Century. Includes holdings information from the world′s libraries. Now includes the Library of Congress Subject Headings as its thesaurus.

Online Journals
(* Licensed by Rhodes College)

• *Blackwell-Synergy
  A collection of over 800 online journals from Blackwell Publishers.
• *JSTOR Literature Journals
• *Literature & Language Online Journals (SerialsSolutions List)
• *Nation Archive
  Established in 1865, the Nation offers an online 135-year archive of reporting opinion and criticism. It is an important collection of primary source material for history, politics, culture and the arts.
• *Oxford Journals Online
  A large collection of online full text journals from Oxford University Press.
• *Project Muse
  Provides 100% full-text, user-friendly online access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers.
• Directory of Open Access Journals - 3,200 free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, many of them searchable at the article level.

Major Online Reference Sources
Note: Many reference sources remain in print such as Contemporary Authors and Contemporary Literary Criticsm

Biographical
(* Licensed by Rhodes College)

• *African American Authors, 1745-1945: Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
• *African American Autobiographers: a Sourcebook
• *The Age of Milton: an Encyclopedia of Major 17th-Century British and American Authors
• *American Ethnic Writers
• *American Naturalistic and Realistic Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary
• *Asian American Novelists: a Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
• *Asian American Playwrights: a Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
• *Asian-American Poets: a Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
• *Black American Poets and Dramatists: Before the Harlem Renaissance
• *Black American Prose Writers: Before the Harlem Renaissance
• *Black American Prose Writiers of the Harlem Rennaissance
• *Catholic Women Writers: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook
• *Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
• *Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: an A-Z Guide
• *Notable African American Writers
• *Writers of the American Renaissance: an A - to - Z Guide

• Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes
• *Concise Oxford Companion to African-American Literature
• *Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature
• *Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
• *Dictionary of Midwestern Literature
• *Dictionary of Native American Literature
• *Dictionary of Writers and Their Works
• *Encyclopedia of American Poetry
• *Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature
• *Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature
• *Encyclopedia of Literature and Science
• *Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism
• *Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies
• *F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia
• The Oxford Book of American Essays (Project Bartleby)
• *Oxford Companion to African American Literature
• *Oxford Companion to American Literature
• *Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature
• *Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English
• *Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
• *Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction
• *Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
• *Oxford Encyclopedia of Children′s Literature
• *Poe Encyclopedia
• *Vietnam Experience: a Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films
• *William Faulkner Encyclopedia

Websites

• American Author Links
• English Literature Links / Brock University, Canada  
• Intute Arts & Humanities
  Welcome to the Arts and Humanities pages of Intute. We are a free online service providing you with access to the best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists.
• LitLinks - Literary Links on the Web
• Literary Criticism Collection / Internet Public Library
  The IPL Literary Criticism Collection contains critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by nationality and literary period.
• Literary Resources on the Net / Rutgers
• LSU Libraries: Literature Webliography
  Consists of general guides, bibliographies, book reviews, dictionaries, style guides, and periodicals
• Mississippi Writers Page (U Mississippi)
  The heart of this web site are the Writer Listings, a collection of articles on each author detailing biographical information, a comprehensive list of published titles, various awards and honors, and a selected bibliography of additional resources. Also included are relevant World Wide Web links to other information sources on the Internet
• PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide
• Penn On-Line Literary Research Tools  
• Poetry Website (Library of Congress)
• Voice of the Shuttle
  Humanities resources on the internet.
• World Literature Links (Open Directory)
  The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

Electronic Texts

• Baldwin Online Children′s Project
  The Baldwin Project seeks to make available online a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. Our focus, initially, is on literature for children that is in the public domain in the United States.
• Baldwin Library of Children′s Literature, Digital Collection
  The Baldwin Library Digital Collection at the University of Florida includes over 2500 fully digitized children′s books, published in the United States and Great Britain between 1850 and 1900 (selected from more than more than 100,000 in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children′s Literature, dating from the mid-1600s through 2007).
• Early American Literature Collection
  A public accessible subset of 158 volumes by 58 authors of the Early American Literature Collection.
• Electronic Text Collections (Internet Public Library); Bibliomania; Project Gutenberg; Online Books Page (UPenn); Online Library of Literature; Page by Page Books; Project Bartleby; Oxford Text Library; Online Medieval and Classical Library
• English Server
  The EServer is an arts and humanities e-publishing co-op based at Iowa State University where hundreds of writers, editors and scholars gather to publish over 35,000 works free of charge.
• Library of Congress Collections: Zora Neale Hurston Plays, 1925-1944; Walt Whiteman Notebooks, 1850s & 1860s
• Modern English Collection - UVA
  This heterogeneous collection contains fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, manuscripts and illustrations from 1500 to the present, arranged for browsing by author′s last name or by category of interest. Each text is encoded in either SGML or XML and includes a bibliographic header with details about the creation of the electronic text and its print source. While many of the objects are publicly accessible, they are not all in the public domain. The vast majority are copyrighted to the University of Virginia or another owning institution or individual, and have been made available here for limited uses.
• PENNSound
  PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives.
• Works of Edgar Allen Poe
• Wright American Fiction 1851-1875
  This is a collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright′s bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2,887 volumes included (1,763 unedited, 1,124 fully edited and encoded) by 1,456 authors.
• Poetry Archives
  We have collected thousands of classical poems to help you recall fond memories or to help create new ones. Our database is searchable by first-line, author and poem title by key words using the search feature located on the top right corner of each page.
• Uncle Tom′s Cabin and American Culture (UVA)
• Wright American Fiction: 1851-1875
  This is a collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright′s bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875.