Major Research Tools

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)

Full-Text, Index
Coverage: 1892-present

Index of books, articles, and other publications on literature in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. Covers more British publications than MLA International Bibliography. Includes links to some full text. From the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA).


Gale Literature

Full-Text

Database for researching authors and their works, literary movements and genres. Contains full text of literary works, journal articles, literary criticism, reviews, and biographical information. Also known as Literature Research Center.


Gale Primary Sources

Full-Text

Coverage: 1604-2008

Research environment for finding primary sources mainly from Great Britain and the United States covering the 17th to 20th centuries.


Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism

Full-Text, Reference

Guide to literary critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.


MLA International Bibliography

Index

Coverage: 1884-present

Index of scholarly articles, edited books, and dissertations on literature, languages, film studies and folklore. Includes MLA Directory of Periodicals, which provides detailed information on periodicals covering literature and languages. For help searching MLA, see our Search Guide.


OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Full-Text, Reference

Searchable version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the origins and usage of English words.


Other Suggested Research Tools

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

Full-Text

A collection of works providing “access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.” A project from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Digital Schomburg of the New York Public Library.


American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals

Full-Text

Provides digital access to a highly comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1912. Subject coverage includes: advertising, health, women's issues, science, the history of slavery, industry and professions, religious issues, culture and the arts, and more. Produced by a partnership between EBSCO and the American Antiquarian Society (AAS).


American Broadsides & Ephemera, 1749-1900

Full-Text, Visual Resource

Collection of over 30,000 documents, many in full color, fairly evenly split between broadsides (spanning 1749-1900) and ephemera (1820-1900). Contains rare items such as sailing cards, playbills, menus, music programs, advertisements, etc. Built in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society.


American Periodicals Series Online

Full-Text

Digitized images from American magazines and journals that originated between 1741 and 1940. Includes general interest magazines, children's publications, women's magazines, and literary and professional journals.


Arts & Humanities Citation Index

Index
Coverage: 1999-present

Index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. Allows you to search for a topic, an author, or for articles that cite a known author or work.


Atlantic Magazine Archive

Full-Text
Coverage: 1857-2014

Digitized cover-to-cover archive of The Atlantic, a prominent, longstanding U.S. magazine covering political issues through literary and cultural commentary.


Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature

Full-Text

Digitized collection of children's books published in the United States and Great Britain between 1850 and 1900. From the University of Florida Libraries.


Books of the Century

Coverage: 1900-1999

Lists of bestsellers, Book of the Month Club selections, and "critically acclaimed and historically significant" books for each year of the 20th century.


British Literary Manuscripts Online

Full-Text

Coverage: 1120-1900

Digitized collection of British manuscripts, including poems, plays, novels, diaries, journals, religious writings, and correspondence. Consists of two parts (Medieval and Renaissance, and 1660-1900), which can be searched separately or together. Note that while the full text of the manuscripts is not searchable, a searchable, detailed description is provided for each.

Burney Collection of Newspapers

Full-Text

Digital collection of early English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries. Includes pamphlets, broadsides, periodicals, and an extensive collection of London newspapers.


Digital Theatre Plus

Streaming video of British theater productions plus supplementary study and teaching materials.


Drama Online

Full-Text

Digital collection of play scripts "from Aeschylus to the present day." Plays can be searched by criteria such as theme, genre, setting, and cast size. Includes streaming versions of performances from Shakespeare's Globe and National Theatre.


Early American Imprints

Full-Text

Includes Series I ("Evans"), nearly every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America from 1639-1800, and Series II ("Shaw-Shoemaker"), American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the early part of the 19th century. Also includes supplements to the collection from the Library Company of Philadelphia.


Early Americas Digital Archive

Full-Text, Gateway

"Collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820."


Early English Books Online

Full-Text

Collection of texts printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473 to 1700. Includes literary texts, sermons, legal documents, scientific treatises, and many other types of works.


Eighteenth Century Collections Online I and II

Full-Text

Digital collection of 180,000 English language books, pamphlets, essays, and broadsides published from 1701 to 1800. Titles cover history, fine arts, medicine, science, literature, law, philosophy, and religion.


Eighteenth Century Drama

Full-Text

Collection of almost every play submitted for license between 1737 and 1824, plus documents that provide social context for the plays. Includes the London Stage Database, 1660-1800 and the companion Biographical Dictionary of Actors, etc.


Eighteenth Century Journals

Full-Text
Coverage: 1685-1835

Full-text of magazines and newspapers providing a broad representation of print journalism in the eighteenth century. Most titles are British, but the collection also includes titles from from Canada, the Caribbean, India, and France. Minimal overlap with materials in other collections such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), The Burney Collection, etc.


Electronic Literature Directory

Gateway

Directory of electronic literature ("poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction that make significant use of electronic techniques or enhancements").


Essay and General Literature Index Retrospective

Index

Coverage: 1900-1984

Index of essays published in books and periodicals.


Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text

Full-Text, Index

Index of journal articles and books on film and media studies. Includes some full text.


Gale Literary Index

Index

A master index to reference works, such as Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Dictionary of Literary Biography, published by Gale; these works contain biographical information about authors, excerpts of criticism of their works, and short bibliographies. Gale Literature Research Center provides online access to some of these works.


Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Encyclopedia - Archive

Full-Text, Reference

Encyclopedia of GLBTQ art, literature, film, music, and popular culture. The encyclopedia was closed and archived in 2015.


Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective

Index

Coverage: 1907-1984

Index of major journals in the humanities and social sciences.


Independent Voices

Full-Text

Open Access collection of over 1,000 alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals from the 1960s-80s focused on the following series: Feminism; LGBTQ; Ethnicity and Race; Campus/community; GI Press; Small literary magazines; Right-wing press.


Literary Manuscripts, Berg

Full-Text
Coverage: 19th century

Collection of manuscripts by--plus primary documents from and about--15 major Victorian era authors such as Browning, Emily Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Tennyson, and more. Sourced from the NYPL's Berg Library.


Literary Manuscripts, Leeds

Full-Text
Coverage: c. 17-18th Centuries

Database of 17th and 18th century poetry with many facets for browsing and searching (e.g. first and last line, author, length, form, etc.) from the collections of the University of Leeds.


Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive, 1554-2007

Full-Text

Archive devoted to the history of the book, including printing, bookbinding, and the publishing trade.


Making of America

Full-Text

Collection of primary sources for the study of American social history, featuring books and journals published primarily between 1850 and 1877. From the University of Michigan and Cornell University.


Motif-Index of Folk Literature

Reference

Classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, medieval romances, jest-books, and local legends. The above links to the index (Volume 6). To directly access other individual volumes: Vol. 1; Vol. 2; Vol. 3; Vol. 4; Vol. 5.


NeuRoN

Gateway

Provides descriptions of and links to digital projects relating to British Romanticism. Curated by scholars, with subcategories such as individual artists, women's writing and history, political history, diaries and letters, etc.


Nichols Collection of Newspapers

Full-Text
Coverage: 1672-1737

Digital collection of early English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries. Includes an extensive collection of English newspapers as well as pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals.


Paris Review Interview Archive

Full-Text, Index

An index to hundreds of interviews of famous authors published in the Paris Review since its founding in 1953, plus many full-text interviews.


Perdita Manuscripts

Full-Text
Coverage: 1545-1752

Digital facsimiles of manuscripts by early modern women writers from the UK and Ireland, covering topics ranging from daily life to religion to biography and more.


Periodicals Index Online

Index

Electronic index to millions of articles published in over 6,000 periodicals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, covering more than 300 years.


Play Index

Index

Index of plays written from antiquity to the present and published from 1949 to the present. Searchable by title, author, subject, style, genre, cast type, and more.


Poetry Archive

An online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. For each poet represented, a biography and select bibliography is also included.


Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape

Full-Text

Digitized archive from the Wordsworth Trust featuring manuscripts, notebooks, and correspondence of William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many of their contemporaries from the Romantic period.


Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database

Index
Coverage: 1878-present

Online version of Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index. Contains references to articles, books, news reports, and motion picture reviews, including both scholarly and fan writings. Covers horror as well as science fiction and fantasy.


SFE: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Full-Text, Reference

Encyclopedia of English-language science fiction, with entries covering authors, themes, awards, etc.


State Papers Online, 18th Century 1714-1782

Full-Text

Coverage: 1714-1782

Collection of digitized British government records from the National Archives of the UK. These full-color manuscript scans cover the reigns of George I and George II, and part of the reign of George III. The content details the inner workings of the government during such major events as the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the Seven Years' War, and the majority of the American Revolutionary War.


TLS Historical Archive

Full-Text, Index
Coverage: 1902-2014

Index and full text of the Times Literary Supplement (London), an important source of reviews of books, plays, and films.


Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture

Full-Text

Collection of primary sources that provide a context for understanding the place of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in American culture. Includes representative antebellum texts related to Christianity, sentimental culture, anti-slavery, and minstrel shows as well as responses to the novel.


Victorian Popular Culture

Full-Text
Coverage: 1779 - 1930

Collection of images, posters, playbills, books, objects, and ephemera (e.g. pamphlets, handbills) documenting popular entertainment in the Victorian era. Divided into 4 modules: spiritualism/magic; circuses; theater/music halls; and cinema.


Victorian Web

Full-Text

Information on the politics, culture, and society of the Victorian era (1837-1901). Originating from materials from English literature courses at Brown University; additional contributions from scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates from institutions around the world.


Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875

Full-Text

Searchable collection of 19th century American fiction. Works are available as images and as text. Provided by Indiana University.