Research Databases: English/Literature

An indispensable reference work for English studies, with more than 960,000 records from 1892 to the present, with regular monthly updates of newly indexed material. Widely regarded as one of the most important bibliographical sources for English studies.

African American Poetry contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a comprehensive survey of the early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry Prince's 'Bars Fight', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

The authors and works included in the collection show the huge variety of this relatively unexplored area of American literary history. Coverage includes writers from both North and South, from rural and urban backgrounds, and ranges from university-educated professionals to those for whom the very acts of reading and writing constituted a defiance of Southern slave laws.

Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century, American Drama 1714–1915 provides literary researchers and historians with a comprehensive survey of American dramaturgy from its origins up to the era of sensational melodrama and manners comedy exemplified by the work of such playwrights as David Belasco, Clyde Fitch and William Vaughn Moody.

Early landmark texts represented in the collection include Robert Hunter's satire Androboros (1714), the earliest printed American play, and Thomas Godfrey's tragedy The Prince of Parthia (1765), the first American play professionally performed on an American stage. Highlights from the nineteenth century include George Aiken's stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most popular dramatic works of its period both in America and Europe, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1857) by William Wells Brown, and The Octoroon (1859), widely recognized as Dion Boucicault's most important American-themed play.

Created in partnership with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, this unique collection contains the full text of more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets drawn from over 700 printed sources, many of them rare and inaccessible outside Canada. The collection comprises essentially the complete cannon of English-Language Canadian poetry from the seventeenth century up to the early twentieth, and includes Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Archibald Lampman, Charles G. D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott.

A database that includes biographic details on approximately 100,000 modern novelists, poets, playwrights, nonfiction writers, journalists and scriptwriters. Featured are current writers, the most-studied literary figures of the early 20th Century and authors from around the world whose works have been translated into English or published in the United States.

The years 1789–1875 saw the publication of many masterpieces of American fiction, and the Early American Fiction 1789–1875 collection restores the original literary context of these enduring classics, situating the work of canonical writers alongside numerous novels and short stories popular in their own time but now forgotten and largely inaccessible in print form.

The collection includes first editions of works by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Other highlights of the pre–1850 content include William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, which has been recognized as the first American novel, extremely rare items such as the American printing of Susanna Haswell Rowson's Charlotte and Joseph Holt Ingraham's Alice May; or, The Lost of Mount Auburn.

Novels and short stories from the third quarter of the nineteenth century include Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, and William Wells Brown's Clotelle, acknowledged as the first published novel by an African American writer.

Early English Prose Fiction is a balanced and representative survey of fictional prose in English from the period 1500-1700, comprising more than 200 works. The collection explores the rich diversity of prose fiction preceding the emergence of the realist novel as its dominant form. The database includes numerous rare texts inaccessible in print form together with early editions of all the best-known works of the period, such as John Bunyan’s "The Pilgrim’s Progress" and Sir Philip Sidney’s "Arcadia." Many different kinds of fiction are represented, from prose romances (such as Roger Boyle’s "Parthenissa") through to popular jest books (such as George Peele’s "Merrie Conceited Iests" and John Skelton’s "Merie Tales") and specimens of rogue literature (for example Elkanah Settle’s "The Notorious Impostor" and the anonymous "Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse").

Eighteenth-Century Fiction brings together 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700–1780 by writers from the British Isles. It is among the largest collections of literature from the period available in electronic form.

The eighteenth century saw an enormous increase in the production and publication of prose narratives. It was a period of great creative experiment as the structure and conventions of what would be termed the novel were shaped and developed. Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers students and researchers access to this dynamic period of English literary history. It not only represents all the major writers associated with the 'rise of the novel' - Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne - but also many less well-known, but equally vital and significant figures, such as Penelope Aubin, Richard Graves, Charles Johnstone, Mary de la Rivière Manley and Sarah Scott.

English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas. The works were acted on or intended for the stage, and includes masques, interludes, short dramatic pieces, translations, and adaptations. In addition to works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge, English Drama includes the dramatic writings of many more neglected writers long inaccessible in print form.

The original ground-breaking Chadwyck-Healey collection, English Poetry, contains over 160,000 poems, essentially comprising the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles from the 8th century to around 1900. Drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources, more than 1,250 poets are represented.

In addition to the six-volume series of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, several landmark anthologies are available in their entirety, including England's Helicon, Richard Tottel's "Miscellany", and Robert Dodsley's "A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands."

Redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection with the addition of more than 20,000 poems from several new categories.

Essentially comprises the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th, drawing from nearly 4,900 printed sources and representing more than 2,700 poets. The newly-added works illuminate both the literary heritages of Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries and the poetic legacies of English writers only recently brought back to scholarly attention.

The Faber Poetry Library contains the works of 50 poets comprising 140 volumes of poetry. The authors are all part of the Faber Poetry list and the database enjoys the active support of the publisher and the poets or their estates. Authors covered include Simon Armitage, Rupert Brooke, Wendy Cope, T. S. Eliot, Lavinia Greenlaw, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, David Jones, Louis MacNeice, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Sylvia Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender and Edward Thomas.

A reliable and comprehensive archive of important scholarly journal literature, including searchable and browsable tables of contents and full text articles from both multidisciplinary and discipline-specific journal collections.

The King James or Authorized Version of the Bible was printed in 1611 and became the standard edition of the Bible for nearly three centuries. Arguably the most influential single document for English literary studies, this fully searchable online version presents the full text (of the ‘He’ version) with all introductory matter, annotation, calendars, genealogies and tables.

Over 1,000 works, including formal treatises on criticism, essays and manifestos, literary prefaces, theories of imagination, taste and aesthetics, and major examples of contemporary theory, by more than 350 writers trace the history of literary theory and criticism from Plato to Judith Butler.

A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 200 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.

Up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.

Provides detailed information on thousands of journals and book series in the fields of literature, language, linguistics, film, rhetoric and composition, and folklore. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Offers a detailed bibliography of journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association, coverage dates back to the 1920s and contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4,400 journals & series and 1,000 book publishers.

250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, stretching from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s. Major novelists of the period such as Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and the Brontës feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children's literature.

Nineteenth-Century Fiction represents the great achievements of the Victorian canon and reflects the landmarks of the period, portraying the genre in all its energy and variety, from horror to social satire, from moral earnestness to aestheticism, from masculine adventure to feminist polemic. In addition to the better-known novels, the collection covers many neglected or little-known works, most of them out of print or difficult to find.

The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past.

An archive with backfiles of scholarly periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences that provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of titles. The database spans more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages.

Provides 100% full-text access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers.

Provides indexing of over 3 million articles from more than 550 leading magazines, including full coverage of the original print volumes of Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. This important resource offers a wide range of researchers access to information about history, culture and seminal developments across nearly a century.

Twentieth-Century African American Poetry is an unparalleled collection of 9,000 poems by the most important and influential African American poets of the last century. Coverage begins with the key writers of the early decades (James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, and Claude McKay), continues with major figures of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps and Sterling Brown) and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s (Imamu Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez), and concludes with a considerable body of writing of the 1980s and 1990s, including major figures such as Ai, Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa alongside young writers who have gained recognition through national poetry awards or inclusion within leading print anthologies.

Brings together 50,000 poems by over 300 poets. The major works of the modernist period – the brittle imagist lyrics of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and William Carlos Williams, the playful and abstract masterpieces of Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings, the symbolist cityscapes of Hart Crane – can be read alongside contemporary works such as the Whitmanesque prophetic verse of Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic lyrics of Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Major movements of the century are represented, including the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, the Deep Image poetry of Robert Bly and James Wright, underground literature by the Beat poets, the influential feminist works of Adrienne Rich, and the works by the confessional poets. Selected major African American writers such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Imamu Amiri Baraka are included; however, much more comprehensive coverage is given in the complementary collection Twentieth-Century African American Poetry.

Bringing together an unparalleled collection of the most important works from the last century from the English-speaking world, Twentieth-Century Drama features plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists. The collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Neil Simon, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong.

Twentieth-Century English Poetry is a collection of 598 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to 2000, including W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Thom Gunn, Fleur Adcock, Paul Muldoon, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating poets from The Faber Poetry Library.

The collection reflects the multiple concerns and techniques of a century's writing. From modernist experiment to post-modern playfulness, from Georgian convention to free-verse confession, and from Edwardian poetry of empire to post-imperial diversity, the collection embraces vital contrasts and continuities.

A searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide from 1960 to the present.