Literatures in English: A Research Guide

A scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. Serves as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American; supports scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials; and develops software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis.
Note that NINES will lead to some digital projects which are proprietary sites, accessible only by institutional or personal subscription. Many will not be available through Rutgers.

A searchable online database of hundreds of collected works of poetry published before 1920.

A searchable text, based on the 1918 Massachusetts Historical Society edition.

Around 40 works including titles by Harriet Jacobs and Phillis Wheatley.

A highly regarded site including primary material (scholarly editions of O Pioneers and My Antonia, first editions of several works, non fiction, interviews), scholarship (including Cather Studies), biographical information (including the full-length biography by James Woodress) and other material designed for teachers and students. An up-to-date site with plans to include additional critical editions and other material.

An online collection of works by and about the African American writer and political activist Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) including 63 electronic texts of works by Chesnutt; around 100 review articles relating to his works; and a number of manuscript pages of what became his novel 'The House Behind the Cedars'.

Based on edition by Mabel Loomis Todd (Boston: Little Brown, 1896).

A fine full-text site with several relevant clusters of texts–First Person Narratives of the American South, Library of Southern Literature, and North American Slave Narratives, among others.

A web page with links to electronic versions of quite a few novels and stories, plus lots of related materials.

A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. More than three million pages from books and journals. The Michigan share of a multi-institutional initiative. Includes a fine search engine.

Based on the Putnam's Monthly version, November and December 1853.

Includes text and image of the different editions of Whitman's work, plus images of his manuscripts.

The Wright American Fiction online collection attempts to include every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875. It includes works by well known writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with a great many forgotten authors, whose works may have been very popular in their own time.

A highly regarded site, with a growing number of texts and wonderful reproductions.

British Fiction allows users to examine bibliographical records of 2,272 works of fiction written by approximately 900 authors, along with a large number of contemporary materials (including anecdotal records from letters and other reports, circulating-library catalogues, newspaper advertisements, reviews, and subscription lists).

More than eighty texts by sixty poets.

Featured articles, thematic essays, biographical sketches and digitized items divided into five periods of British literature: 20th century, Romantics & Victorians, the Restoration & 18th century, Shakespeare & Renaissance, and Medieval. From the British Library.

Includes a biography, poems, and links to articles and related content.

Reproduces full texts of five editions or states of the Lyrical Ballads, the Bristol imprint of 1798; the London (1798) imprint, and the two-volume editions of 1800, 1802, and 1805.

An electronic edition of the 1884 edition by Francis T. Palgrave.

Includes a growing number of electronic texts and a wide variety of scholarly materials– bibliographies, reviews, conference information, and Romantic Circles Praxis Series, a collection of critical and scholarly articles.. A great starting place.

Provides students and scholars with access to all of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials, most drawn from the period when DGR's work first appeared and established its reputation (approximately 1848-1920), but some stretching back to the 14th-century sources of his Italian translations.

A guide to literature, history, and culture in the age of Victoria. Includes biographical, critical, and historical essays, some written for Victorian Web and some excepted from other sources.

Especially good for the second and third rank of Victorian women writers. Includes poetry, novels, children's literature, religious tracts, political pamphlets, etc.