Library Resource Guide for: ENGLISH

Individual Databases for English

MLA International Bibliography  
1926-present; the MLA International Bibliography is a bibliography of journal articles, books and dissertations. The electronic version of the bibliography contains over 1.5 million citations from more than 4,400 journals and series and 1,000 book publishers.

Literature Resource Center (LRC)    
Current; provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. The LRC covers more than 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, and indexes publications such as Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Authors.

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1920 -  
The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) contains over 860,000 records, covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards.

Academic Search Premier    
Current; multi-discipline, full text database, designed for the academic community. Includes full text coverage for just under 4,700 journals, including 3,600 peer-reviewed journals.

African American Poetry    
African American Poetry contains poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry's Bars Fights, c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

American Drama 1714-1915    
Includes dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, reflecting American dramatic writing in all its richness and diversity: plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented. Major dramatists featured include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller.

American Poetry    
American Poetry contains over 40,000 poems by more than 200 poets, covering the Colonial period to the early twentieth century, and drawn from over 1,200 printed sources. The collection begins with early Colonial poems and continues through to early twentieth-century writers. Major canonical poets and important literary groups, such as the Transcendentalists and the Knickerbocker school, can be read alongside substantial bodies of work by less familiar authors well known in their day.

APS Online    
1740-1900; APS (American Periodical Series) Online contains over 1,100 periodicals including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.

Arts and Humanities Citation Index  
1975-present; source for information in all arts and humanities disciplines. Useful for retrieving recent articles that cite a known earlier article.

Bibliography of American Literature    
Bibliography of American Literature describes in exhaustive detail the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to 1930. More than 37,000 works are listed.

Black Drama    
1850-present; when complete, Black Drama will contain the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Canadian Poetry    
Created in partnership with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, this unique collection currently contains the full text of more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets including Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Archibald Lampman. The collection comprises essentially the complete canon of English-language Canadian poetry from the seventeenth century up to the early twentieth century.

Early American Fiction 1789-1850    
Created in partnership with the University of Virginia Library, the collection consists of facsimile page images and keyword-searchable full text for more than four hundred works of American prose fiction published before 1850, including key titles such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Early American Fiction 1789-1875    
Created in partnership with the University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction 1789–1875 extends the coverage of the first Early American Fiction collection by twenty-five years (1851–1875) and currently offers the full text of 634 first editions of American novels and short stories by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain and Herman Melville as well as a host of minor writers of the period.

Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800) Digital Edition    
Ongoing; based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography, this resource serves as the foundation for research on every aspect of 17th and 18th century American life. Upon completion, Evans Digital will consist of over 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.

Early English Books Online (EEBO)    
From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this collection now contains about 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Subjects include English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

Early English Prose Fiction    
A collection of more than 200 works from the period 1500–1700, exploring the rich diversity of prose fiction in English in the period preceding the emergence of the realist novel as its dominant form. Early English Prose Fiction offers the full text of works by key writers such as John Bunyan, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe and Aphra Behn, and has been produced in association with the Salzburg Centre for Research on the Early English Novel (SCREEN).

Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare (1591-1911)    
1591-1911; eleven major editions from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-86. Includes individual plays, related works, and more than one hundred adaptations.

Eighteenth Century Fiction    
A collection of 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700–1780 by writers from the British Isles. Key figures covered include Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. In addition to a scanned version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the collection also contains two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

English Drama    
A unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.

English Poetry    
The original ground-breaking Chadwyck-Healey collection, English Poetry contains essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets are drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.

English Poetry, Second Edition    
Redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century with the addition of more than 20,000 poems from several new categories. Containing more than 183,000 poems by over 2,700 poets, it is the most comprehensive archive of English verse from the 8th century to the early 20th century.

Faber Poetry Library    
A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of Thom Gunn, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.

IIPA Full Text (International Index to the Performing Arts Full Text)    
1864-present; draws its content from scholarly and popular performing arts periodicals, and also indexes a variety of documents such as biographical profiles, conference papers, obituaries, interviews, discographies, reviews and events. IPAFT covers nearly all aspects of the performing arts, from scholarly studies to snapshots of popular culture.

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts  
1973-present; LLBA covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Complete coverage is also given to various fields of linguistics including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.

Literature Online (LION)    
A fully searchable full text database of English and American poetry, drama and prose, accompanied by a substantial collection of full-text literary journals, and other critical and reference works.

Nineteenth (19th) Century Masterfile  
1802-early 20th Century; provides online access to an enhanced version of the major Anglo-American subject index for periodicals of the 19th century, as well as a number of other general and publication specific indexes for journals, newspapers, and books of the era. Now includes Catalogue of Scientific Papers!

Nineteenth Century Fiction    
A collection of 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 Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and the Brontës feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children's literature.

Oxford English Dictionary    
The OED Online contains the complete text of the 20-volume Second Edition, first published in 1989, together with its 3-volume Additions Series, published in 1993 (volumes 1 and 2) and 1997 (volume 3). The OED is currently being revised, with the aim of producing a completely updated third edition by the year 2010. Draft material from the revision programme will also be published online, representing the latest progress towards the new edition. More revised and new entries will be added to the online Dictionary every quarter.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Full Text    
1637-present; ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Full Text is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. PQDT Full Text includes 2.4 million dissertation and theses citations from around the world from 1861 to the present day together with 1 million full text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works. Each dissertation published since July 1980 includes a 350 word abstract written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include 150 word abstracts. Bibliographic citations are available for dissertations dating from 1637. Where available, PQDT Full Text provides 24-page previews of dissertations and theses. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text also offers researchers unlimited access to digital copies from their own institutions as well as affordable copies from others.

Twentieth-Century African American Poetry    
Twentieth-Century African American Poetry includes poetry written by the most important and influential African American poets of the twentieth century. Coverage begins with the key writers of the early decades (James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, 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, 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.

Twentieth-Century American Poetry    
This unparalleled collection includes 50,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets. It includes the major works of the Modernist period, works from the Black Mountain School and the Beats, works by underground poets, feminist writers, confessional poets, and many other schools of writing. It also contains two distinguished poetry series, the Yale Series of Young Poets and the University of Pittsburgh's Pitt Poetry Series.

Twentieth-Century English Poetry    
A collection of 598 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to the present day, 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 the poets in The Faber Poetry Library.

Women Writers Online    
1400-1850; full text collection of writing by women in English with currently about 200 texts and growing. Includes a wide range of subjects and genres, and all texts are transcribed in full, including front and back matter.

World Shakespeare Bibliography Online  
1964-present; WSB Online provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare.