Literature Links

Internet Library of Early Journals
A digital library of 18th and 19th century journals.

ArchivesUSA provides information on more than 4,400 archival repositories in the United States that have combined holdings of nearly 100,000 special collections. The database combines three index directories of primary source materials. First, an updated directory that supersedes the Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the United States, last published in 1988. Second, the collection records from the National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections, information gathered and compiled by the Library of Congress from the 1950s through 1995; and third, collections indexed in the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States. The database is updated quarterly and is searchable by individual collection or repository site.

MLA Bibliography is a massive index and abstracting service focused on the subject areas of literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the index is international in scope, and incorporates both periodicals and books. Coverage is 1963 to the present. MLA Bibliography is on FirstSearch.

Humanities Abstracts is an index to humanities periodicals. Subjects comprising the database include archaeology, classical studies, folklore, history, language and literature, performing arts, philosophy, religion and theology, and related fields. Coverage is 1984 to the present. Humanities Abstracts is on FirstSearch.

LION is a group of full-text databases. NIU Libraries currently subscribes to a selection of these databases. English Poetry (1100-1900) contains over 165,000 poems from approximately 1,250 poets. American Poetry (1600-1900) contains over 40,000 poems from over 200 poets. African-American Poetry (1750-1900) includes nearly 3,000 poems written by African-Americans. This Web site also provides access to the King James version of the Christian Bible, links to other useful Web sites for the study of literature, and a Master Index for author or title keyword searches of the literary databases in LION and related e-texts.

WorldCat is the largest bibliographic database numbering over 35 million records. In addition to books the database includes sound recordings, videos, computer files, maps, etc. WorldCat is on FirstSearch

Web Resources

• Internet Links for Literature
• Writing and Composition Resources on the WWW
• Linguistics Resources for Teaching and Research

General

• The English Server at CMU
• Malaspina Great Books Homepage
• Project Gutenberg Etext Archive
• The World Wide Web Virtual Library

Specific Periods/genres

• African American women writers of the 19th century
  This site makes available several dozen works, each text scrupulously reprinted with no posthumous editing, each preface intact, fromm 30 hitherto inaccessible volumes of 19th century African American women's literature. This site is well organized, providing search tools that allow the reader to search by title, author, and genre.
• American verse project
  This site provides electronic versions of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. Users can read volumes on the Web and download them. So far 85 volumes have been transcribed, ranging from Emerson and Jones Very to Sandburg and H.D. The opening page of the site offers a variet of choices: a simple search feature for words and phrases; a Boolean search for combinations of two or three words in a line or paragraph; proximity searches; a browsing feature and more.
• Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485)
• CAPA: the Contemporary American Poetry Archive
• Emory women writers resource project
  The works in this small collecton of previously unedited 17th century texts by little-known writers focuses on various aspects of women's lives: intellectual freedom, religious inquiry, and women's standings in royal families. Anyone who wishes to find out more about unrenowned women writers or the process of editing a text will find this site worthwhile.
• Internet Poetry Archive Homepage
• Labyrinth
• Middle English Compendium
  The Middle English Dictionary (in the process) is now complete through u, containing 15,000 pages of scholarly lexicography concerning the English of 1100-1500. Middle English Compendium, now being made available offers an electronic version of the dictionary for the letters i through u only.
• The Canadian literature archive
  This constantly growing site emphasizes bibliographic aids and a multitude of links to sources on Canadian writing.
• The Literature & Culture of the American 1950s
  Alan Filreis (Univ. of Penn) maintains this list of articles and materials on literature, politics, sociology, and the arts for a course on Amerian literature and culture of the 1950s. The opening screen presents a table of contents of the site (authors and major subjects) in alphabetical order, making the list quick to use. This site is interdisciplinary and will be useful to students and scholars in many areas.
• The Middle English Collection at the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia
• The Mississippi writers page
  Each page on this exemplary site has a sidebar menu with quick links to useful features: Book News, News & Events, Literary Landmarks, Browse Writers, etc. The Browse Writers page has an alphabetical listing of the almost 300 authors who are or will be included on this site. Each author page has illustrations, a bibliography, and links to relevant items elsewhere on the Internet. This site is for those interested in southern or regional literature.
• Oxford Text Archive Homepage
• Romantic circles
  Visitors to this website are informed that it is "devoted to the study of Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, their contemporaries and historical contexts. The neatly leaid out homepage directs visitors to publications, conferences, electronic editions, scholarly resources, reatures, and Romantic Praxis. Romantic Praxis is an online scholarly journal, which welcomes submissions and can also be searched for information on various topics related to Romanticism.
• Victorian women writers project

Specific Authors

• Bibliomania, The Network Library
• The Bronte Sisters-Cecilia Falk
• The complete works of William Shakespeare
  This site offers a chronological/alphabetical listing of the plays in the Moby categories of comedy/history/tragedy (plus poetry). A searchable concordance makes possible swift location of terms, e.g., "question," by play, act, scene.
• C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Homepage
• The Dickens Project
• The Edith Wharton Society
  This site was designed to serve the scholarly membership of the society, but it offers well-organized features useful to others interested in this important American writer and her works. The list of primary sources links to a large and growing number of e-texts, and the bibliography of secondary sources, confined to recent publications (1992 and after) is dense in layout.
• Geoffreychaucer.org: an annotated guide to online resources
  Students, teachers, and scholars of Chaucer will find a broad array of useful electronic and print resources, including primary texts, critical studies, graphics, audio readings, syllabi and related course materials online discussion groups, and databases. Thematically organized and succinctly annotated to assist users in determining the relevance and quality of items, the site includes easily navigated areas such as background, bibliography, language, outlines, etc.
• Jane Austen Info Page
  This site contains e-text versions (both annotated and plain text) of Austen's six novels, minor works, and letters, and less-serious writings about Austen (e.g., "the Jane Austen top ten song list"). Users can conduct keyword searches of HTML text, including searches of her six novels -- review the occurrence of a particular word in the text, a list of places in the text, or a list of its characters, including genealogical charts.
• The J.R.R. Tolkien Information Page
• Lewis Carroll Homepage
• Mark Twain Resources on the World Wide Web
• Shakespeare Web
• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet
• Sixteenth Century Renaissance English Literature

Linguistics

• Applied Linguistics Virtual Library
• Linguist List
• SIL-Summer Institute of Linguistics
• Web-Accessible Linguistic Data Sources and Programs
• Literary Hyper Calendar