LibGuides: Literature Research: Websites

Literary Reference Resources

Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology
Find over 9,000 text files listing c. 400,000 items (books, book chapters, articles, films, plays, poems, websites, videos, audio files, etc.), with a main focus on English-speaking authors and criticism or literary theory written in English. This bibliography includes basic bibliographical information on several thousand authors, critical schools, literary and linguistic concepts, genres, periods, motifs, and other subjects.
Cambridge History of English and American Literature
Considered the most important work of literary history and criticism ever published, the Cambridge History contains over 303 chapters and 11,000 pages, with essay topics ranging from poetry, fiction, drama and essays to history, theology and political writing.
The Literary Encyclopedia
The Literary Encyclopedia is a constantly evolving and updating repository of authoritative reference work about literary and cultural history.

Man Seated with Reading and Writing Tools

Ryūryūkyo Shinsai, Man Seated with His Reading and Writing Materials before Him, early 19th century. Polychrome woodblock print. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Literature Collections

Digitized Public Domain Books from around the World

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Internet Archive Books
The Internet Archive began a program to digitize books in 2005 and today they scan 1,000 books per day in 28 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1923 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library site.

Middle English

Middle English Compendium
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.
Middle English Texts Series
The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.

16th-19th Centuries

The ARTFL Project
Founded in 1982 as a result of a collaboration between the French government and the University of Chicago, the ARTFL Project is a consortium-based service that provides its members with access to North America's largest collection of digitized French resources. The link will take you to ARTFL's public databases.
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians
Explore literary treasures from the Romantic and Victorian periods.
Victorian Women Writers Project
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.

American Literature

American Authors
This site provides useful, interesting, advertising-free information on the subject and to provide links to the best information available for American literature from the earliest days through the 1920s.
American Authors on the Web
Find links to biographies of many American authors from the 1570s to the 1950s and/or websites devoted to them. Beware that there may be some dead links.
Library of Southern Literature
The "Library of Southern Literature" includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924. This collection begins with some of the earliest texts about America written by British discoverers that set the foundation for American letters and traces the development of southern literature through to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Voices from the Gaps
University of Minnesota professors Toni McNaron (English) and Carol Miller (American Studies and American Indian Studies) founded VG/Voices from the Gaps in 1996 to uncover, highlight, and share the works of marginalized artists, predominately women writers of color living and working in North America.