LibGuides: English: Web Resources

African American Literature

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
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From the website: "African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920."
Voices from the Gaps
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This site focuses on the lives and works of women writers of color. You can browse by the author's name, birthplace, racial/ethnic background, or by significant dates.
African American Literature from Voice of the Shuttle
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Part of the larger, highly regarded Voice of the Shuttle site. Provides links to primary texts, literary criticism and biographical information on African American writers.

Literary Theory

A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology A collection of bibliographies on topics and authors of interest from the viewpoint of theory and criticism.
Foucault News
Glossary of Literary Terms
Introduction to Modern Literary Theory
Introductory Guide to Critical Theory
Literary Theory (Voice of the Shuttle)
Open Semiotics Resource Center
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"The purpose of this site is to provide innovative, responsible and reliable knowledge in a variety of domains relevant to semiotics understood as the multidisciplinary study of information, meaning, communication, interpretation, sign systems and evolution, texts, interactions, organizations, cultural and social transformations, sense-making and all other topics that may emerge from future research, models and theories."
Semiotics for Beginners

General Literary Sites

Voice of the Shuttle " Its mission has been to provide a structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media."

Internet Pulic Library2: Literary Criticism Reviewed list of links to critical and biographical websites about authors and their work.

Digital Collections

Medieval Manuscripts on the Web " The list below is intended to offer quick access to various digitization projects on the web: clicking the project title will take you directly there. Listings are alphabetical by country, then city, and then by originating institution."

Nines (19th Century Literary Scholarship Online) A clearinghouse for scholarship on 19th-c. British and American studies.

Project Gutenberg Contains over 2550 freely available famous and important texts. This includes many literary works. Browse or search for titles and download the text or compressed file from one of many FTP sites.

Virtual Books A collection of digitized books from the British Library.

Author Archives

Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts "...gathers together in the virtual space of the web some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. Through digital reunification, it is now possible to access, read, and compare high quality images of original manuscripts whose material forms are scattered around the world in libraries and private collections. Unlike the famous printed novels, all published in a short span between 1811 and 1818, these manuscripts trace Jane Austen’s development as a writer from childhood to the year of her death; that is, from 1787 (aged 11 or 12) to 1817 (aged 41). Not only do they provide a unique visual record of her imagination from her teenage experiments to her last unfinished writings, these pages represent one of the earliest collections of creative writings in the author’s hand to survive for a British novelist."

Mark Twain Project "...offers innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project."

Walt Whitman Archive From the website: "The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers....The Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa)."

William Faulkner on the Web From the website: "William Faulkner on the Web is intended as an evolving guide to the life and works of William Faulkner."

Zora Neale Hurston Plays "The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress present a selection of ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until they were rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997."

American Literature

Academy of American Poets
American Authors
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A wealth of information on selected American Authors.
Early Americas Digital Archive
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EADA is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to 1820.
Library of Southern Literature
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"The "Library of Southern Literature" includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924. This collection was originally based on Dr. Robert Bain's bibliography of the hundred most important southern literary works and continues to expand under the guidance of scholarly advisors Dr. Joseph M. Flora and Dr. William L. Andrews. 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."
Modern American Poetry
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"The Modern American Poetry Site is a comprehensive learning environment and scholarly forum for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry."
PBS American Masters: Literature
Storytellers Native American Authors Online
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"This site was conceived with a very particular aim: to make the writing of modern Native American authors, particularly the poets, both more visible and more widely available. The site now contains information on Native American poets and novelists. Toward that end, the sites residing on this server have been made with the collaboration of the authors. The authors see the sites before they are made public, edit these pages, contribute additional material, and select, or at least help to select, their work which is made available to be read online. They are able to control their own image to a greater degree than they are able to in book cover and other advertising material, even better than they are sometimes able to in published interviews. They also maintain the copyright to all of their own material."

British Literature

Luminarium
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Covers Medieval, Renaissance, and 17th Century British literature. Includes many known authors from each period with biographies, bibliographies, essays, and other links.
Norton Anthology of English Literature
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This companion web site to the Norton Anthology offers background, links to primary texts, and coverage by historical periods.
Middle English Compendium
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From the website: "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."
Romantic Circles
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Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture. Includes extensive resources including scholarly texts, critical essays, chronologies, and blogs.
Internet Shakespeare Editions Our aim is to inspire a love of Shakespeare's works by delivering open-access, peer-reviewed Shakespeare resources with the highest standards of scholarship, design, and usability. Since 1996, the ISE website has been an innovator in providing academic resources for the online digital medium.