English Literature Online Resources

Databases
(* Licensed by Rhodes College)

*360Search
Click on "English Literature". 360Search will then simultaneously search a number of databases that contain literature related sources.

  • Dictionary of National Biography
    An illustrated collection of 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain′s past, from the fourth century BC to the year 2000.
  • *EEBO - Early English Books Online (1473-1700)
    Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
  • *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.
  • Shakespeare Searched
    Shakespeare Searched is a search engine designed to provide quick access to passages from Shakespeare′s plays and sonnets. We cluster search results by topic, work, and character to make it easy to find exactly what you′re looking for. From something as simple as identifying the speaker of a particular quote to discovering underlying thematic elements across works, Shakespeare Searched has you covered.
  • *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.
  • *World Shakespeare Bibliography
    A searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1962 and 2007. Containing over 112,300 annotated entries, this collected information is an essential tool for anyone engaged in research on Shakespeare or early modern England.

Online Journals
(* Licensed by Rhodes College)

Selected Online Reference Sources
(* Licensed by Rhodes College)
Note: Many reference sources remain in print such as Contemporary Authors and Contemporary Literary Criticsm

Websites

Electronic Texts

  • 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).
  • Beowulf: A New Translation For Oral Delivery (U Wisconsin)
  • William Blake Archive
    The William Blake Archive is an online hypermedia environment that allows its users to access high-quality electronic reproductions of a growing portion of Blake′s work. These reproductions have been prepared according to the highest technical and scholarly standards, with the cooperation of a number of the major museum, library, and private collections.
  • British Poetry 1780-1910 
    A hypertext archive of scholarly editions: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia.
  • CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
    CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts, brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of 11 million words, in 956 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the other arts.
  • Eighteenth-Century E-Texts
    The following catalogue includes most of the electronic editions of eighteenth-century works publicly available on the network. "Eighteenth century" is understood extremely broadly — this very long eighteenth century runs from Milton through Byron, or thereabouts
  • 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.
  • Illustrated Shakespeare Collection ( U Wisconsin)
    This online collection of selected electronic facsimiles seeks to share the marriage between book art and Shakespearean text with a wider audience. It also suggests the variety of responses by visual and book artists to the stimulus of Shakespeare′s words
  • Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature
    Texts, biographies and criticism of authors from the Medieval, Renaissance and 17th Century periods
  • The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe: An Electronic Edition
  • John Milton Reading Room (Dartmouth)
    The site now contains all of Milton′s poetry in English, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and selections of his prose. Almost all of the works presented here have been fully annotated; most have solid introductions as well.
  • 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.
  • Oxford Shakespeare (Project Bartleby)
    The 1914 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare ranks among the most authoritative published this century. The 37 plays, 154 sonnets and miscellaneous verse constitute the literary cornerstone of Western civilization. Also see:Bartlett′s Shakespeare Quotations.
  • 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.
  • Poets Corner
    he goal of this project is to create a user-friendly library of works that promotes browsing and exploring through a site that spans thousands of works by hundreds of authors covering thousands of years.
  • Project Gutenberg EText Archive
  • Renasence Editions: An Online Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799
  • Reprentative Poetry Online (U Toronto)
    Representative Poetry Online, version 3.0, includes 3,162 English poems by 500 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto, in 1912 (one of the first books published by the University of Toronto Press), and used in the English Department at the University until the late 1960s.
  • Swinburne Project
    The Swinburne Project is a digital collection, or virtual archive, devoted to the life and work of Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. When complete the project will provide students and scholars with access to all available original works by Swinburne and selected contextual materials, including contemporary critical reactions, biographical works, and images of artwork about which Swinburne wrote.
  • Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto
    On this site you will find the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.
  • Treasures in Full: Caxton′s Chaucer
    On this site you will find William Caxton′s two editions of Chaucer′s Canterbury Tales, probably printed in 1476 and 1483.
  • AVictorian Anthology, 1837–1895: Selections Illustrating the Editor’s Critical Review of British Poetry in the Reign of Victoria
    These 1,274 works by 343 authors represent the full course of one of the great literary ages of English verse. Organized by class, this encyclopedic collection complements Stedman’s American Anthology.
  • Victorian Women Writers Project (U Indiana)
    The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The
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