English Literature Digital Library - Directory of Online Publications

English Studies> English Literature > Digital Library

See also

The Online Books Page
"The On-Line Books Page is a directory of books that can be freely read right on the Internet. It includes: An index of thousands of on-line books on the Internet, Pointers to significant directories and archives of on-line texts, Special exhibits, and more!"
Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom

 

Alexander Pope's Work
Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series

American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)
Founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney

  • The Shakespeare File: What English Majors are Really Studying - (dead link)

Australian Humanities Review
"a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary electronic journal"

Authors on the Web - Irish Author Roundtable (March 2002)
"In our AuthorsOnTheWeb IRISH ROUNDTABLE Liam Clancy, Eoin Colfer, Marita Conlon-McKenna, M·ire B. de Paor, Maureen Dezell, Emma Donoghue, Randy Lee Eickhoff, Andrew M. Greeley, Mary E. Lyons, Morgan Llywelyn, Regina McBride, Malachy McCourt, Jamie O'Neill, Martin Roper, and Niall Williams discuss what role their heritage has played in their writing, and their feelings on the humor, melancholy, and mysticism of the Gaelic soul."

Bartleby.com
A wonderful collection of Reference, Verse, Fiction, and Nonfiction works online.

Blithe House Quarterly
"an online literary magazine featuring a diversity of new short stories by emerging and established gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered authors"

British Poetry 1780-1910
A Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions
Electronic Text Center, Alderman Library, University of Virginia

 

Classical Studies Greek Drama and Poetry Database Project
Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece in Late Twentieth-Century Drama and Poetry
"The database aims to enable Reception studies to address issues of performance with the same degree of rigour and attention to evidence which is expected in textual studies and has been designed so that it can be searched for the careers of individuals and theatre companies as well as for Greek and modern authors, plays, themes and reviews...We hope that the database will prove a useful research and learning resource for academics and students working not only in Classical Studies but also in related areas such as modern literature and theatre studies. It will include material relating to poetry and film as well as drama."
Dept. of Classics, Open University

Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe
"This site provides an edition of Marlowe's works that begins to transcend the limits of print publication and exploit the flexibility of an electronic medium. We are committed to reaching as broad an audience as possible and so offer this site at no cost to users. Included here are all of Marlowe's plays, his two known poetic works, Hero and Leander and The Passionate Shepheard to His Love, his translations of Ovid and Lucan, and the short miscellaneous works attributed to Marlowe, a dedicatory epistle to Mary, the Countess of Pembroke and the epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood. You may access these texts through the site's index of Marlowe's works. - (dead link) Our edition of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus provides a particularly interesting case study of some of the editorial possibilities opened up in the shift from print to the electronic medium."

Dictionary of Sensibility - (dead link)
"This hypertext offers a new approach towards understanding the language of eighteenth-century sensibility. It provides an atmospheric view of the multiple connotations of the terms of that language. Rather than attempting strict definitions, this project offers a tool for recognizing the multivalence of such words as "virtue," "enthusiasm," and "community." Our hypertext collects excerpts from primary texts of sensibility and scatters them among twenty four key terms."
By Corey Brady, Virginia Cope, Mike Millner, Ana Mitric, Kent Puckett, and Danny Siegel, Dept. of English, University of Virginia

e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies
"...The journal is an integral part of the Center's mission to promote and disseminate research and communication related to Celtic cultures, past and present, in the academic arena as well as for the general public... The journal will provide free access to cutting-edge, peer-reviewed articles solicited to address specific themes from a range of cross-disciplinary and international perspectives."

Early Manuscripts at Oxford University
"Digital facsimiles of complete manuscripts, scanned directly from the originals. Beginning with collections of Celtic manuscripts from several Oxford libraries, and subsequently extended to include a broader range, the project is creating high resolution digital images."

Eighteenth Century Resources -- Literature
Includes an extensive collection of E-texts and other Web resources
Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University

EIRData - A-Z Datasets
Prince Grace Irish Library (Monaco) Electronic Irish Records Dataset
"The A-Z Dataset provides comprehensive biographical & bibliographical information on 4,500 Irish writers, along with extracts from their works and commentaries upon them. Journals holds similar material on Irish serial publications of all periods."

Electronic Literature Directory
"It provides an extensive database of listings for electronic works, their authors, and their publishers. The descriptive entries cover poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction that makes significant use of electronic techniques or enhancements...The Directory provides easy access to one of the most exciting and fastest-growing bodies of cutting-edge literature. Among the new forms of writing represented here are hypertexts and other interactive pieces, kinetic or animated poems, multimedia works, generated texts, and works that allow reader collaboration."

Emory Women Writers Resources
"...is a collection of edited and unedited texts by women writing in English from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. The Project is a pedagogical tool, designed to offer graduate and undergraduate students in various disciplines the opportunity to edit their own texts."
Prof. Sheila Cavanagh, Director

Exploring "The Waste Land"
 "Part of the difficulty in understanding The Waste Land is due to Eliot's use of allusion. By taking the view that allusion is actually a different form of hyperlinking I have translated The Waste Land into a hyperlinked presentation. I have also used hyperlinks to allow ease in cross-referencing the various lines of the poem...The Exploring The Waste Land site consists of two sub-sites. One is a traditional non-framed site that consists of one window where following a link will cause the window display a new page of to show information. It is not an alternative to the framed sub-site, it presents different information. The second sub-site uses framed windows and hyperlinks to let you easily branch from one line of the poem to another. There are two frames which are always displayed and never change. One displays the full poem while another is provided for you to get help. In the other two frames or windows you can view definitions, translations, Eliot's notes, some of the original draft of the poem, some of the text that Eliot alludes to and my commentary. There are many pages allowing quick cross references (e.g., where are churches mentioned?) Instructions and hints are included (or will eventually be.) These can be accessed through the help frame"
By Richard A. Parker

The Harvard Classics and Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction
Selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD., 1909-1917
Published by Bartleby.com, 2001.

The Hockliffe Project
"...designed to promote the study of early British children's literature. It will provide internet access to the full texts of the Hockliffe Collection of Early Children's Books, owned by De Montfort University, and will accompany this archive with contextualising documents and research...The books in the Hockliffe Collection range in date from 1685 to the mid-twentieth century, although the majority of works were printed between 1760 and 1840."

Humanities Text Initiative from the University of Michigan - (dead link)
A large selection of online texts and images although some collections have limited access

  • Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse - (dead link)
    "The Humanities Text Initiative intends to develop the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse into an extensive and reliable collection of Middle English electronic texts, either by converting the texts ourselves or by negotiating access to other collections produced to specified high standards of accuracy. At present, sixty-one texts are available; several others will be added soon. HTI wants to include in the corpus all editions of Middle English texts used in the MED, and the more recent scholarly editions which in some cases may have superseded them."

Indigenous Peoples' Literature

Irish Literature, Mythology, Folklore, and Drama
In addition to online texts also includes History, Language, and Periodicals.
By Anniina Jokinen

A Journal of the Plague Year - (dead link)
By Daniel Defoe
"This account of the Great Plague of London(1664-65) was first published in 1722. In it Defoe describes the horrifying daily events in London city as it was besieged by bubonic plague."

The Kenyon Review

Leeds Database of Manuscript English Verse
"BCMSV, in progress, contains detailed information about the individual items of English verse contained in the 17th and 18th-century manuscripts in Leeds University Library's Brotherton Collection."

The Literary Encyclopedia
"...isa free scholarly reference work. Currentlyit lists some 5500 writers who are read in the English-speaking world and other historical figures who have made a major contribution to global culture."

Literary History
"...seeks to collect critical or explanatory web writings about American and British literature that will be of value for graduate students, scholars, teachers, college students, high school students, and other intrepid readers of literature. We specialize in critical articles and we index only free articles. We currently index articles on 41 major nineteenth century British authors and 142 twentieth century British and American authors."
By Jan Pridmore

Luminarium
Sections include: Medieval ; Renaissance ; 17th Century.
"This site combines three sites first created in 1996 to provide a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature. Nothing replaces a quality library, but hopefully this site will help fill the needs of those who have not access to one.
By Anniina Jokinen

Medieval Forum (MF)
"...a new electronic journal for the promotion of scholarship in Medieval English Literature...MF is dedicated to providing a venue for the free exchange of ideas, a return to the original vision of a public forum informed by a collegial and cooperative spirit. Electronic format has been chosen to afford a wide circulation of articles by a broad range of contributors, particularly independent scholars, who wish to share their perspectives in a communal atmosphere.

The Modern English Collection
 "This heterogenous 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 SGML and includes a bibliographic header with details about the creation of the electronic text and its print source.
The Electronic Text Center at The University of Virginia

Nineteenth Century Children's Literature
 A bibliographic database of the the British Library's Children's Collection. The collection holds 2,369 titles on 5,527 fiches.
Edited by J. Barr

The Online Books Page
"The On-Line Books Page is a directory of books that can be freely read right on the Internet. It includes: An index of thousands of on-line books on the Internet, Pointers to significant directories and archives of on-line texts, Special exhibits, and more!"
Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom

The Oxford Shakespeare
Edited by W. J. Craig, 1914
"This 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 unrivaled literary cornerstone of Western civilization."
From Bartleby.com

Oxford Text Collection
"For over 20 years the OTA has been collecting electronic texts produced by the academic community and redistributing them back into this community. At present we have roughly 2000 titles, comprising major authors, reference works and linguistic corpora. All our texts are available free of charge, many are available directly from our web site, others require (for the moment) users to send us an order form."

Palimpsest OnLine
Penn State's University's Electronic Classics Series Site
" From here you can access free files in Adobe Portable Document Format. These files include original work published in hard copy by the Pennsylvania State University and classical works of literature in English."

Persuasions: The Jane Austin Journal On-Line - (dead link)

Peter Nicholson
An introduction to the work of this Australian poet.

Romantic Circle Praxis Series
ISSN: 1528-8129
"...is devoted to using computer technologies to investigate critically the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism."
Formerly known as Romantic Praxis: Theory and Criticism.
Edited by Orrin N. C. Wang

Renascence Editions
 Works Printed in English, 1477-1799
"Renascence Editions is an effort to make available online works printed in English between the years 1477 (when Caxton began printing) and 1799. These texts have been produced with care and attention, but are not represented by the publisher as scholarly editions in the peer-reviewed sense...The dual mission of the Renascence Editions is to provide readable Web editions of early modern English works to the general public and to provide a site for publication of such works"
University of Oregon

The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page

Scottish Authors - (dead link)
"The Gateway to Scottish Authors is an HTML version of the Scottish Library Association publication "Discovering Scottish Writers"...It contains all of the biographies of 80 Scottish authors from the past included in the original publication, with appropriate hyperlinked cross-references

Short Stories at East of the Web
Sections include: fiction ; horror ; non-fiction ; sci-fi & fantasy ; romance ; crime ; hyperfiction ; humour ; children

University of Chicago Electronic Text Services

University of Toronto English Library (UTEL)
"Sizable full text collection of poetry, drama, and prose and non-fiction works, together with criticism and theory resources, glossaries, a history of English, and English composition resources. Works are selected for their usefulness to the university English student. Developed, maintained, and edited by Prof. Ian Lancashire, University of Toronto Department of English."

Victorian Women Writers Project
"The works, selected with the assistance of the Advisory Board, will include anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama. Considerable attention will be given to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate bibliographical descriptions of them."
Perry Willett, General Editor, Indiana University

Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature
The tutorials are based on primary documents and original poems relating the experience of World War I
Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University

Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive
Includes his war poetry, interviews with war veterans, photographs, letters, and video clips.

The Works of John Donne