Literatures in English: A Research Guide

Searches across a wide array of library resources. Often the simplest way to find the full text of a literary work. Enter the title in “double quotes” and run your search. Once you have a list of results, select the Available Online limit in the "Filter my results" menu at the left. You can use additional filters (e.g., Resource Type = Books) to further narrow your results.

More than 355,000 works of English & American poetry, prose, and drama, plus the text of more than 400 journals, and a variety of reference sources.

More than 250 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose, including works by Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Steve Biko, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nelson Mandela, Dambudzo Marechera, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p'Bitek and Tayeb Salih. A particular strength of this collection is the inclusion of women's poetry from The Heimemann Book of African Women's Poetry (1995).

More than one thousand memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters written by private soldiers, officers, politicians, and other civilians.

Contains the text of 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed information on productions, theaters, and production companies. Dates range from 1850 to the present. Featured playwrights include Amiri Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ntozake Shange.

Full text of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writing by leading figures in African American life and culture, including Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells, A. Phillip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson and hundreds of others. Types of material include articles and essays, monographs, speeches, interviews, pamphlets and correspondence. Approximately twenty percent is previously unpublished, including transcripts from the Columbia University Oral History Project. Also available online for the first time is the complete run of the Black Panther newspaper, 1966 through 1980.

Collection spanning nearly four centuries and including the writings of almost 500 women.

Searchable collection of poetry and fiction produced in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages. Particular titles of note include the works of Derek Walcott, José Martí, Wilson Harris, as well as numerous Creole dictionaries.

A digitized collection of printed literature for children produced from the 1820s through the 1920s. The collection focuses on literature published in the Americas, but it also includes many sources published in Europe. The collection contains a wide variety of children’s materials, including alphabet and object books; chapbooks; pamphlets; pop-up books; printed books; sheet music; sketches, drawings, and paintings; stereo photographs; and toys and games. Materials in this collection are sourced from the American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum and Library.

Access to nearly every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in the American colonies or the United States between 1639 and 1800. Among the vast range of publications included are: advertisements, almanacs, bibles, catalogs, charters and by laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, and treaties. Includes 37,000 works and 2,400,000 page images.

Full-text, online image collection containing practically all books (nearly 120,000) printed in the English language and non-English language books printed in British territories from 1475 to 1700.

Standardized, accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of nearly 50,000 titles from EEBO.

Nearly comprehensive collection of the works published in the English language (and non-English language works printed in the United Kingdom) during the eighteenth century, now comprising approximately 180,000 books, with 33,000,000 pages. Covers the full spectrum of intellectual activity in the century: literature, history, geography, law, science, medicine, technology, the fine arts, religion, philosophy, political science and government. Includes poems, plays, novels, histories, travel books, parliamentary papers, parish registers, conduct books, cook books, almanacs--all the categories and genres published during the period.

Fully searchable text of over 60,000 letters and documents of British, American, French, German, and other Enlightenment figures, unpublished or previously published in dozens of critical editions for over 7,000 correspondents, including writers, scientists, booksellers, philosophers, politicians, political thinkers, in original language editions or translation.

Collection of original documents relating to Empire Studies, including sections on cultural contacts; literature and empire; empire and religion; and race, class, imperialism, and colonialism. Note that it is a selection of documents, rather than a comprehensive collection, and thus might be better suited to instructional use than exhaustive research.

Digital collection documenting feminist thought and initiative around the world through more than 4,000 monographs and 300 periodicals from continental Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, mostly in English, French and German. Both feminist and anti-feminist perspectives are represented, as well as dispassionate accounts of the condition of women through the centuries.

The collection’s primary focus is poetry, but the manuscripts also include songs, riddles, recipes, musical scores, plays, miscellanies, commonplace books, political works, and religious texts. Poets represented include: Mary Campbell, John Dryden, George Herbert, Mary Leapor, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, and Hester Pulter.
Jonathan Swift

Includes the Berg Collection’s complete materials for the following Victorian authors: Matthew Arnold, The Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Hundreds of thousands of pages of the personal writings of women from the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. Date coverage is approximately 1750-1950, and the collection is particularly strong in the nineteenth century material. The contents consist of high quality images of the original manuscripts.

Database of primary source collections for the 19th Century, primarily British and American, but including material from other nations and in other languages. Unlike comparable collections for earlier periods (Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online), NCCO is selective, including not all publications from the period, but thematic groupings of materials, called Archives (most of which have multiple sub-collections). Rutgers has acquired the eight Archives published as of summer 2015, including ones on women, photography, Europe & Africa, and British theater, music and literature.

Full text access to the personal writings of American women from all classes and walks of life, from the colonial period to 1950. Includes approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries, plus 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Represented are all age groups, all ethnic groups, many geographical regions, the famous and the unknown.

Full-image database of the handwritten books of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. The database includes books from the sixth through the sixteenth centuries. Texts represented are mostly in Latin, Anglo-Saxon or English. The collection, assembled by Archbishop Matthew Parker in the late sixteenth century includes texts on religious history from the early Middle Ages through the Reformation. The Parker Library is particularly rich in texts from Anglo-Saxon England, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890), and texts in Middle English, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

A collection of digitized writings by Early Modern women. A variety of genres are represented, including poetry, religious writing, autobiographical material, diaries, drama, cookery and medical recipes, and account books. Some of the featured authors are: Esther Inglis, Sarah Cowper, Margaret Cunningham, Mary Evelyn, Lucy Hutchinson, and Lady Elizabeth Lowther.
Katherine Philips

A multi-disciplinary database designed specifically for academic institutions. With a large collection of peer-reviewed full-text journals, the database offers information in nearly every area of academic study.

Christian Recorder (Philadelphia: 1861-1902 [excluding 1892])
Colored American (New York: 1837-1841)
Douglass' Monthly (Rochester, NY: 1859-1863)
Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY: 1851-1855)
Freedom's Journal (New York: 1827-1829)
National Era (Washington, D.C.: 1847-1860)
North Star (Rochester, NY: 1847-1851)
Provincial Freeman (Chatham, Ontario): 1854-1857)
Weekly Advocate (New York: 1837)

The full text of over six thousand periodicals from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Most are from the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century and most are American, although titles from the British Isles and elsewhere are also included. Features poetry, short fiction, and serialized novels as well as articles.

Includes the full text of articles, advertisements, illustrations, editorial cartoons, obituaries, letters to the editor, etc., from more than 1,100 American magazines and journals that began publication between 1741, when Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine first appeared, and 1940. Popular, special interest and general magazines; literary and professional journals; children's and women's magazines; and many other historically significant periodicals are included.

A fulltext database of over 1,500 newspapers published between 1741 and 1922. It includes the entire text of each issue, including advertisements, classified advertisements, editorials, letters to the editor, poetry, fiction and obituaries. It allows keyword searching within article title as well as full text. Searches may be limited by date, place of publication, article type, and newspaper title.

Searchable, full-text collection of around 500 important British magazines and journals, from the late 17th through early 20th centuries--with particular strengths in the 19th.

A multi-disciplinary database providing bibliographic access-more than 20,000,000 records-to books, periodical and newspaper articles, government publications, and archival collections. C19 combines a variety of print and digital resources into one database, and also allows limited searching of specialized sub-collections.

Digital access to thousands of important scholarly journals. Note that JSTOR is retrospective collection, with a moving wall of 2-5 years--that is the most recent articles in JSTOR will always be at least two years old

Full-text database of American newspapers published between 1800 and 1900. Keyword search allows you to search through the full-text of five hundred titles published in all regions of the country, in both urban and rural communities, throughout the century. Advanced search allows you to limit your search by, among other options, author, title, date and locality, as well as by type of material, such as maps, cartoons, obituaries, and letters to the editor. The complete content of each issue is available, including advertisements, serialized fiction and book reviews.

Complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating.

Search across the six ProQuest historical newspapers to which the Libraries subscribe:
Chicago Defender (July 31, 1909; January 1, 1910 - December 31, 1975)
New York Times (September 18, 1851 – Three years prior to the current year)
Philadelphia Inquirer (November 7, 1860 – December 31, 2001)
Pittsburgh Gazette (August 29, 1786 to December 31, 2003)
Wall Street Journal (July 8, 1889 – 12 years prior to the current year)
Washington Post (December 6, 1877 – 16 years prior to the current year)
Each newspaper can also be searched separately.

A full-text, full-image database of nearly five hundred newspaper titles from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most published in London, but some from other parts of Great Britain and a few from overseas. In addition, there are approximately three hundred "newsbooks." Circulated during the Civil War and the Commonwealth, newsbooks were small, cheap weekly pamphlets of current news, the precursors to modern newspapers, Finally, the collection also includes almost three hundred pamphlets and broadsides.

A collection of streaming videos in a wide variety of academic areas, including anthropology, art & design, business, criminal justice, diversity studies, education, gender & sexuality, health sciences, history, literature & language, music & performing arts, psychology & counseling, science & engineering, social sciences, and more. The collection includes videos from over 1,500 leading distributors, producers, and filmmakers, such as 60 Minutes /CBS, PBS, BBC, NBC, Intelecom, Insight Media, Microtraining, Filmakers Library, Envision, Inc., Stanley Milgram, Dallas Telecourses, and Davidson Films.

ARTstor is a digital image library of approximately 700,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.

The Naxos Music Library is an on-line library of more than 75,000 tracks of music from the catalog of Naxos, a leading classical music label, and selected additional labels. Although Naxos is best known for its classical recordings (with more than 200 released each year), the Naxos Music Library also includes world music, jazz, and national anthems. Naxos offers a number of text resources including overviews of music history, program notes for recordings, and the complete libretti of operas available in the Naxos Music Library.

Thousands of online audio recordings of American folk, blues, bluegrass, jazz, spoken word, and world music.