Literature Web Sites

E-Text Centers

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/alex

This catalog, maintained by Eric Lease Morgan, a systems librarian at North
Carolina State University, specializes in American literature, English literature,
and philosophy. Alex is particularly helpful because the search interface allows
researchers to both look for documents and search the content of those
documents.

American Literary Classics

http://www.americanliterature.com/ARCHIVES/ARCHIVES.HTML

This site contains selected works of American Literature. The scope is limited
but the goals are to promote a new chapter of a different author every week. This
site demonstrates how limiting e-texts can be when encoded in HTML.

American Memory

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html

This site at the Library of Congress's web site seeks to provide digital images,
text, maps, sound files, and movies in order to create a National Digital Library.
This site is worth a check for primary sources of American authors. It has
excellent search capabilities and the digital images have great resolution.

American Verse Project

http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/amverse

The American Verse Project, a part of the University of Michigan Humanities
Text Initiative, is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American
poetry prior to 1920. Full texts are being made available in both HTML and
SGML. At present, over twenty-five verse volumes are available.

Bartleby Library

http://www.bartleby.com

This section of the Bartleby Library contains more recent literary titles but
functions in much the same manner as the original Bartleby Archive.

Bibliomania

http://www.bibliomania.com

This commercial site contains an interesting mix of English language works in
the areas of reference, fiction, non-fiction, poetry and a complete works edition
of Shakespeare. The major drawback is that the text is encoded in HTML and
allows limited searching. The strongest elements here are the reference works.
Includes the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

A Celebration of Women Writers

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/

An index offering texts and information on many women writers who are little
known. At the present time, however, only a minority are active links; of those,
mainly those of past centuries whose works are in the public domain are
available full-text. Biographies, bibliographies and, occasionally, true literary
criticism comprise the secondary literature available on selected authors. To
access such texts and information, one must scan lists organized by authors'
names as well as by country and century.

Documenting the American South

http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/index.html

To remedy the fact that "most information about 19th-century America comes
from Northerners," the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has begun a
text digitization project of documents on the South by Southerners. Texts are
available in SGML (the free SoftQuad Panorama viewer for Windows is required)
and HTML, and selected texts are accompanied by author information, title
pages, illustrations, and other information. Although works are not searchable,
author and title indices are available.

Electronic Literature Foundation

http://elf.chaoscafe.com

Literature teachers, scholars, and lovers of the classics will warmly welcome
this excellent online project. ELF's mission is to provide advanced, free
electronic texts from world literature in several formats and languages.

Electronic Poetry Center

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc

This site serves as an anthology of modern poetry but also contains links to
resources that would be of use to anyone interested in writing or reading poetry.
Contains an extensive list of links to online poetry journals and reviews.

Electronic Text Center

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu

The Electronic Text Center, established in 1992 at the University of Virginia,
combines an on-line archive of thousands of SGML-encoded electronic texts
and images with a library service that offers hardware and software suitable for
the creation and analysis of texts. World masterpieces in the original
languages, some in English translations as well.

Emory Women Writers Resource Project (TEI Standards)

http://chaucer.library.emory.edu/wwrp
A collection of women's writing from the seventeenth through nineteenth
centuries, the Emory Women Writers Resource Project offers students the
opportunity to edit their own primary texts. The site contains unedited texts,
accompanying bibliographic resources and teacher aids, and examples of texts
that students have already edited.

Great Books Index

http://books.mirror.org

A personal site inspired by Mortimer Adler's Great Books Synopticon, this index
provides access to authors in an alphabetical list. Not all have e-texts of their
works up at the present time. Some merely link to sites with information about
them. The "title" index is actually a chronological list of authors.

Humanities at the Data Center

http://scc01.rutgers.edu/datacenter/Humanities

The center provides access to a number of full-text databases among which the
English Poetry Database and the African American Poetry Database are
available to all persons over the Internet. Some of the databases offered here are
only available to students at Rutgers University.

Humanities Text Initiative

http://www.hti.umich.edu

This site at the University of Michigan is a comprehensive collection of digital
texts and images. Many of the individual collections at this site are restricted to
UM students but highlights that can be accessed over the internet for free
include the American Verse Project and Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the
English Language.

Internet Public Library Online Literary Criticism Collection

(http://www.ipl.org/ref/litcrit)

One of the few general sites devoted to literary criticism. Coverage is most
extensive for English language authors but varies from scholarly to personal
impressions of laymen. Access by author, title, country and period.

Library of Southern Literature

http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/southlit/southlit.html

The well-known Documenting the American South Project has recently added
this section, highlighted by twenty-five full texts, available in SGML and HTML
formats.

The Online Books Page

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books

This site serves as an index to over 9000+ e-texts available online. The major
drawback to this site is that many of the sites are older and only contain HTML
format. However, many of the linked sites found on this page are not as user
retrievable through regular Internet search engines.

Online Library of Literature

http://www.literature.org/index.html

This site contains a limited selection of both English and American novelists but
offers the texts in XML format. Not as searchable as it should be but very
readable and printable quality texts.

Oxford Text Archive

http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/

The well-established Oxford Text Archive can now be accessed via its new web
site, a redesign intended to improve navigation, functionality, and to utilize the
SGML metadata available for all texts. Contains 2500 resources in over 25
different languages.

The Poetry Archives

http://www.emule.com/poetry

Currently containing over 3,600 non-copyrighted poems by 137 poets, the
archive is indexed by author name or searchable by keyword. Search results
also display the first line of each poem returned.

Project Bartleby Archive

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby

This is part of the Bartleby Library that was originally produced under the aegis
of Columbia University. It contains e-texts of selected English language prose,
poetry, and reference works that are searchable across titles or within individual
titles. Can be used to find English poetry by phrase. (Ex. "captain of my soul")

Project Gutenberg

http://promo.net/pg/index.html

One of the earliest major e-text cites, includes imaginative literature and history
texts for both well-known and obscure English-American authors as well as
English translations of works of authors in foreign languages. Texts are in
ASCII.

St. Marks Poetry Project

http://www.poetryproject.com

This site serves as a venue for new poetry and is an ancillary arm of the
renowned poetry project at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City.
Poems and link to site of interest for poetry fans are available for free.

SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image

http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext

The center was established in 1996 in Penn's Special Collections Library to
provide the scholarly community with web access to virtual facsimiles of original
texts, documents, and sources from Penn's collections. These include printed
books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, broadsides, ephemera, and recorded
sound. Individual project sites typically reflect collection strengths and/or
highlights.

The Universal Library

http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu

This site provided by Carnegie Mellon University seeks to provide digital access
not only to books, but also to art, music, journals, and periodicals. However, the
book section containing titles by the National Academy Press is the most
extensive collection available. This site links to several different e-text archives.

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Webographic Sites

English-Language Literature Page at UCSD

http://sshl.ucsd.edu/literature/english

This site is part of the library at the University of California San Diego. It is one
of the more all-encompassing sites for locating English literature sources on the
web. It must be taken into consideration that many tools listed here are
restricted to students of UCSD.

Literary Resources on the Net (Jack Lynch)

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit

This site is maintained by Jack Lynch a literature professor at Rutgers
University. It has been around since Professor Lynch was a student at the
University of Pennsylvania and is linked from almost every English literature web
page around. It is probably the most subject specific literature met-site in
existence.

Norton Websources to American Literature

http://www.wwnorton.com/naal

This site maintained by Bruce Michaelson at the University of Illinois seeks first
and foremost to promote the Norton Anthology of American Literature. However,
there are many nice free items that can be of excellent value to undergraduate
researchers. Includes timelines and historical comparisons as well as annotated
web links and author specific content pages.

Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/

This site maintained by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History
at Brown University has become a cooperative which takes submissions from all
over the world that concern the topic of Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature
in English. Included here are e-texts of literature, literary criticism and links to
sites of pertinent interest.

Voice of the Shuttle

http://vos.ucsb.edu/

"Woven" by Professor Alan Liu of the University of California-Santa Barbara, the
Voice of the Shuttle is a comprehensive, well organized meta-site with pointers
to all areas of the humanities. Whether interested in the most basic General
Humanities Resources or specialized disciplines such as Postindustrial
Business Theory, those pursuing humanities research on the net will likely find
the information they need here.

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Individual Authors

Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Text Archive

http://www.libraries.wright.edu/dunbar/

The Digital Text Collection was established to honor Dayton poet and novelist,
Paul Laurence Dunbar, upon the occasion of the rededication of the Wright
State University Library as the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library on May 2, 1992.
This digital collection of a selected group of Dunbar's poetry is intended to
encourage the use of and interest in the works of Dunbar.

William Faulkner on the Web

http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html

This site maintained by John B. Padgett at the University of Mississippi is one
of the most comprehensive sites dedicated to a writer available on the web. It is
designed for advanced scholarly researchers as well as first time readers of
Faulkner. Excellent bibliographies on Faulkner's life and works.

Flashbacks: Tracking Hemingway

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/hemingway.htm

This site is an archive of works on Hemingway published in the Atlantic Monthly.
The section includes many famous authors and is an invaluable source of
critical review as seen from the lifetime of the author.

Picturing Hemingway

http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/hemingway

When reviewing web sources for items of use, it is always a good idea to search
in sites like the Smithsonian. In this instance of Hemingway's centennial, the
National Portrait Gallery has a web tour of its Hemingway Collection.

Jack London Collection

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London

This site equals the Faulkner site in scope but exceeds the Faulkner site in
style. Excellent layout and design of the web format. Includes searchable
e-texts, bibliographies and a concise biography. There are also many digital
images and some sound files.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

This site is one of the best computer assisted searchable databases of the
works of William Shakespeare. The main drawback is that there is only one
edition of the text which is from the Moby Edition. Other highlights include a
discussion area, a glossary of terms, and a quotation section.

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Criticism

Internet Public Library Online Literary Criticism Collection

http://www.ipl.org/ref/litcrit

One of the few general sites devoted to literary criticism. Coverage is most
extensive for English language authors but varies from scholarly to personal
impressions of laymen. Access by author, title, country and period.

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Reviews and Journals

Mississippi Review

http://www.mississippireview.com/

This site publishes creative prose and has an amazing list authors. There
seems to be a good mix of works by well-known authors such as Martin Amis
and by unknown emerging authors. The site has a complete archive from its
beginnings in 1995 to the present.

New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html

This free site contains all of the book reviews published in The New York Review
of Books from 1995 to the present and also includes selected articles from
issues dating back to the beginnings of the review.

Studies in Bibliography

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb

This site is maintained by The Bibliographical Society of the University of
Virginia and contains a complete set of their journal Studies in Bibliography.
This journal is not strictly limited to literature but there are many articles dealing
with literary subjects and there are many detailed annotated bibliographies.

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