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.
Arts and Letters Daily
(http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily)
Users wishing quick and easy access to some of the best writing online will want to
examine this site. Arts & Letters Daily, updated six days per week, offers links to
articles, new book notices and reviews, and essays and opinion pieces in all fields of the
humanities. The does not site provide original content, but rather mines a wide array of
online newspapers, journals, and other publications and offers links with very brief
introductions to the "precious nuggets of real content" on the Web.
The Atlantic Monthly
(http://www.theatlantic.com)
The Atlantic Monthly -- a magazine devoted to politics, society, the arts, and culture
since 1857 -- brings its electronic edition to the World Wide Web. Complete archive for
1995-present. Selected articles are available from 1857-1995.
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://www.cs.cmu.edu/People/mmbt/women/writers.html)
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.
Children's Literature Web
(http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/index.html)
Subject index to children's literature web sites with e-texts, lists of prizes, best
sellers, publishers, discussion groups, printed resources, and reviews.
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.
Concordance of Great Books
(http://www.concordance.com)
Allows searching for one-two words, phrases or initial letters of approximately 200
Great Books classics.
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.
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.
The English Server
(http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu)
Since 1990, Carnegie Mellon University has managed the English Server as a cooperative
dedicated to electronic distribution of texts in many disciplines. The collection centers
on topics related to the study of literature, in the broadest sense. The main page offers
no fewer than 36 subject areas for browsing, from drama and poetry to feminism and
rhetoric. The "new items" list is constantly updated, showing new texts and
resources that are added irregularly. Excellent for finding texts concerning critical
theory.
Featured Author: Ernest Hemingway
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/11/specials/hemingway-main.html)
This site is part of an archive on featured writers at the New York Times Web Site.
The site usually includes all reviews and news articles on the author that have ever been
included in the New York Times. It also includes audio clips and interviews in real
audio format. For contemporary authors, this can be a researchers best source.
First Look at the Crime (Harper Collins)
(http://www.mysterynet.com/firstlook)
This site sponsored by Harper Collins Publishers seeks to promote the publisher's large
collection of crime novels. The site provides first chapters for selected works and also
provides links to web pages for the authors. Would be a great source for public libraries
for collection development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mississippi Review
(http://orca.st.usm.edu/mrw)
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.
New York Times Books
(http://search.nytimes.com/books)
This site contains all of the book reviews from the "Books" section of The
New York Times from 1980 to the present. It also includes first chapters from recent
publications and archives these chapters for years at a time. Selections from very early
book reviews appear from time to time and often coincide with the re-emergence of an
author anniversary of an author.
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.
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://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/ota/public/index.shtml)
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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Text Archive
(http://www.library.wright.edu/dunbar/index.html)
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.
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.
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.
Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English
(http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/misc/postov.html)
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.
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://www.promo.net/pg/list.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.
Random House Inc.
(http://www.randomhouse.com)
This site features Random House Books with reviews, author links, selected excerpts,
and author bibliographies. Could be used for collection development and or for author
biographical information.
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.
