English & American Literature

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of published works by 19th-century black women writers. Part of the Digital Schomburg collection from the New York Public Library, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.

At the Circulating Library (ATCL) was created by Troy J. Bassett, assistant professor of English and Linguistics at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, to provide biographical and bibliographical data about the countless authors, publishers, and novels of the Victorian period (1837-1901).

Search for photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books from the Beinecke's collections. Some materials in this database may be protected by U.S. or international copyright laws or by privacy and publicity rights. Be sure to use the pull down menu to view all the available collections.

The Bodleian Library has unparalleled holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major collections. The original printed materials range from the 16th- to the 20th-Century. The Broadside Ballads project makes the digitised copies of the sheets and ballads available to the research community.

Digitized versions of the famous love letters between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama in ways not possible using any other print or electronic resource. An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660, DEEP provides a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.

The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.

Digital Thoreau is a resource and a community dedicated to promoting the deliberate reading of Thoreau's works in new ways, ways that take advantage of technology to illuminate Thoreau's creative process and facilitate thoughtful conversation about his words and ideas.

This site pro­vides a clear­ing­house for dis­cov­er­ing and shar­ing links to eight­eenth-cen­tu­ry pri­mary ma­te­ri­als. Eight­eenth-Cen­tu­ry Book Track­er aims to build a da­ta­base of bib­lio­graph­ically ac­cu­rate rec­ords that link to freely-a­vail­able texts on­line. By pool­ing its users’ ex­per­tise, the site brings bib­li­og­raph­i­cal order to the some­times hap­haz­ard world of mass dig­i­ti­za­tion. This site is de­voted to pre­serv­ing the iden­ti­ty of eight­eenth-cen­tury books in a dig­i­tal realm where such dis­tinc­tions are at risk of be­ing lost in a sea of mere text.

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive is a collaborative digital archive and research project devoted to the poetry of the long eighteenth century. ECPA builds on the electronic texts created by the Text Creation Partnership from Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECPA was founded and is edited by Alexander Huber, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (editor of the Thomas Gray Archive).

From the University of California Santa Barbara. The EBBA team’s priority is to archive all of the surviving ballads published during the heyday of the black-letter ornamental broadside ballad of the 17th century—estimated to stand at some 8,000 extant works.

These are reliable, expertly edited, and free digital Shakespeare texts for use by researchers. Starting from the Folger Editions of Shakespeare's works edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Digital Texts uses XML to create a highly articulate indexing system. Researchers can read the plays online, download PDFs for offline reading, search a play or the whole corpus, navigate by act, scene, line, or the new Folger Throughline Numbers.

The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

The Lost Plays Database is a wiki-style forum for scholars to share information about lost plays in England, 1570-1642. Plays can be browsed by title, author, year, theater company, or venue; each play's page summarizes the surviving documentation of its existence.

The Herman Melville Electronic Library (MEL) is a collection of digitized versions of texts by Herman Melville, with some images of Melville's manuscripts and plans for the development of digital tools. MEL is being developed and maintained by a group of Melville scholars and digital specialists.

The Herman Melville Electronic Library (MEL) is an in-progress project that aims to be an online center for Melville studies. The "Editions" section currently includes digitized versions of the first British and American editions of Melville's Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.

The Middle English Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.

The MJP is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published.

Contains over 600,000 digitized items from the collections of the New York Public Library. This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.

Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.

The Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. The Rossetti Archive aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions, as well as the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds, including his collaborative photographic and craft works. These primary materials are transacted with a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.

Shakespeare Documented is the largest and most authoritative collection of primary-source materials documenting the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), bringing together all known manuscript and print references to Shakespeare, his works, and additional references to his family, in his lifetime and shortly thereafter. A project of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and the National Archives.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library.

TCP provides access to subsets of the texts contained in three large historical text collections: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans. Texts in the TCP subsets have been enhanced by additional textual mark-up to enable searching options more sophisticated than what is possible in the original databases.

The Victorian Web presents its images and documents, including entire books, as nodes in a network of complex connections. In other words, it emphasizes the link rather than the search tool (though it has one) and presents information linked to other information rather than atomized and isolated. Originally begun back in 1987 as a means of helping scholars and students in see connections between different fields, the site today has greatly expanded the kinds of connections one can find. For example, on this site commentary on the works of Charles Dickens exists linked to his life and contemporary social and political history, drama, religion, book illustration, economics, and so forth.

The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.

The Mellon-funded Visualizing English Print (VEP) project joins computer scientists and literary scholars to scale textual analysis and visualization to increasingly large corpora, beginning with the early modern period. It strives to make early modern texts accessible for computational analysis. Furthermore, its purpose is to design tools to support the workflow of of humanist scholars.

The diaries in this digital collection were written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.

Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible. The range of genres and topics covered makes it a truly remarkable resource for teaching and research, providing an unparalleled view of women’s literate culture in the early modern period.

The Yellow Nineties Online is an open-access electronic resource for the study of avant-garde aesthetic periodicals of the British fin de siècle. Searchable facsimile editions allow users to analyze physical features as well as content, and the editors write a critical introduction for each volume to situate it in its moment of production and reception. Contextual study of these magazines is enhanced by a searchable archive of 1890s reviews and advertisements, as well as by peer-reviewed biographies of contributors and associates written by international experts in the field.

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