LibGuides: English Literature: Websites

Gateways to resources and general guides

Literary Devices and Terms
Definitions and examples of use for over 130 literary devices and terms.

In addition to EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), which are available only to members of the University, the following sites provide free access to texts online:

Electronic Text Center
The Electronic Text Center's holdings include approximately 70,000 on- and off-line humanities texts in thirteen languages, with more than 350,000 related images (book illustrations, covers, manuscripts, newspaper pages, page images of Special Collections books, museum objects, etc.).
The Online Books Page
Includes links to more than 12,000 English works freely available online for personal, non-commercial use.
The Oxford Text Archive
Provides access to an extensive collection of high quality electronic texts, reference works and linguistic corpora.
Treasures in Full
Selected works from the British Library's collection, including Shakespeare and Chaucer.

American Memory Collection
A gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.
Academy of American Poets

Children's Literature Association
Children's Collection
Over 6,000 books and journals written for children, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries

Digital Library of the Caribbean
Full text resource providing access to provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean and circum-Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
Covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. N.B. This is a bibliographic index, it does not provide full text access to the resources listed.
The Labyrinth: resources for medieval studies
The Labyrinth provides free, organised access to electronic resources in medieval studies through a WWW server at Georgetown University. This project not only provides an organisational structure for electronic resources in medieval studies, but also serves as a model for similar, collaborative projects in other fields of study. The Labyrinth project is open-ended and is designed to grow and change with new developments in technology and in medieval studies.
Luminarium
Articles and essays about authors and their works are included in this anthology of medieval, renaissance and 17th century English literature.
Medieval Monsters
British Library website.
The Middle Ages
British Library website.
ORB: The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies
Provides links to many medieval documents, reference sources and electronic periodicals for medieval studies.
TEAMS Middle English texts series
Edited editions of several Middle English texts, along with introductions and select bibliographies for each text.

Luminarium
Articles and essays about authors and their works are included in this anthology of medieval, renaissance and 17th century English literature.
Renascence editions
An online repository of works printed in English between the years 1477 and 1799.

Early Stuart Libels
An online repository of over 350 early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources, many previously unpublished.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive
The Shelley-Godwin Archive provides digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, including the Frankenstein manuscripts.
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians
Selected works from the British Library's collections, with essays, articles and information about individual authors.

Charles Dickens: The Publishing Formats of his First Editions
(YouTube video 05:23 mins) Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Early Literature at Peter Harrington talks about the different publishing formats of Charles Dickens' first editions. www.peterharrington.co.uk
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians
Selected works from the British Library's collections, with essays, articles and information about individual authors.
Victoriana on the web
This site provides links to a wide range of useful sources, including links to archive catalogues, bibliographies, online texts and sites about women's writing.
The Victorian Web
Information on many aspects of Victorian Britain from politics and gender to science and technology.

First World War Poetry Archive
Primary and secondary material on First World War poets, including poems, pictures of the poets, diary entries and letters, audio of oral history and podcasts of interviews with academics and contextual photos, video and ephemera.

Before believing the information given on a web site, or quoting it in your essay or project, think about the following:

Authority

Accuracy and reliability

Currency

Audience / relevance

Is the information of the right level to be quoted in your project? If it is aimed at the general public or school children it might not be!

Feel!

Is the site well structured and easy to navigate?
Are the links from the page up-to-date and valid?
If it is well designed and maintained then you can feel more confident about the information it provides