British and American Literature

Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

Produces standardized, digitally-encoded editions of early print books that are indexed in Early English Books online.

Serves as the foundation for research on every aspect of 17th and 18th century American life. Provides a single search site for the following individual Early American Imprint databases: Evans: 1639 - 1800, Shaw: 1801 - 1819, and Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia: 1801 - 1819. Keyword and Advanced search features plus browsing by genre, publisher, author, place of publication, subject, and language. Full-text access to all content listed.

A fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800.

Indexes publications of the Anglo-American World, 1790-1919, and provides links to the full text of many of the resources. 

Provides access to digitized documents and images regarding the American South from the first colonies in Virginia through the 20th century.

Explore the life and experiences of the lower classes of 19th century London - working class, street life, efforts at poor reform, and other records of the less-than-genteel Victorian London. Provides access to a full-text searchable collection containing color digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London. Emphasizes rare or unique material, particularly in the range of ephemera and street literature, as well as an emphasis on visual material. Keyword, advanced, and popular search options, with limits on dates, collection title, and document type. Adam Matthew Digital.

Discover original posters, books, pamphlets, audio clips, and early film covering various aspects of popular entertainment from Britain and America during the Victorian era. Introductory essays for each of the four collections covering spiritualism to music halls to moving pictures covering 1779 to the early 1930's. Includes a chronology, biographies, glossary, and information on the various special collections which contributed to the resource.

Provides access to a collection of primary source documents from the archive of The Worshipful Company of Stationers & Newspaper Makers. Topics covered include the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the establishment of legal requirements for copyright provisions and the history of bookbinding. 

Full-text of prose fiction written by Americans between 1774 - 1920. 

Provides both manuscripts and some rare printed material for a broad range of authors from across the nineteenth century. Authors include Matthew Arnold, the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Some of the printed matter are early editions annotated by the authors. Included are unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts, and drawings trace the inspiration and genesis behind the period's greatest works. Provides a mass of personal correspondence revealing the close circles and interconnectedness of the Victorians. Searchable by keyword and by author collections, document type, document subtype, item author, and item recipient. Adam Matthew.

Provides full text of works of English, American, African-American, and Canadian poetry, English and American drama and prose, and full-text literature journals. In addition it offers some of the leading literary reference works and links to web texts. 

Provides access to the literature (poetry, prose, books, book chapters) from writers who originate geographically and culturally from South and Southeast Asian countries and migrated to western countries.

Indexes plays written in or translated into English from antiquity to the present including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.

Digital library of over 25,000 scripts of more than 6,000 living playwrights.
Downloadable (PDF) scripts of contemporary drama, searchable by plays, people, and organizations. Includes filters by cast size and type, age level, genre, subject matter, production history, actor and narrative attributes, and playwright location.

Contains the full text of more than 1 500, American dramatic works from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous other genres are represented in the collection. 

Provides insight into the theatrical world of eighteenth century society and explores how the Larpent plays reflect the politics of the time, the role of women, views on race and religion, opinions on empire, and European and British history. Features three distinct areas: Primary source documents, the focus of which is the Larpent collection of plays and Anna Larpent's Diaries; the London Stage Database; and the Biographical Dictionary Database. Adam Matthew

Provides full text copies of plays, farces, operatic and musical dramas, burlesques, and other forms of theatrical entertainment which appeared on the American stage between 1820-1900. Keyword and advanced search features, with limits for subject, author, place of publication, language, and genre. Readex.

Provides a digital collection of scripts and author information. Features plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists, the collection includes works by over 300 writers. The full range of dramatic styles, genres, and traditions is represented, from widely studied and frequently performed plays to important examples of radical theatre, regional theatre, postcolonial theatre, women's theatre, and popular forms such as farce and thriller that are often under-represented in surveys of the period. Searches may be done for playwright, title, and keyword in the play. Proquest/Chadwyck-Healey.

Provides full text of works of English, American, African-American, and Canadian poetry, English and American drama and prose, and full-text literature journals. In addition it offers some of the leading literary reference works and links to web texts. 

Covers a wide range of 20th century theatre history with online streaming video. Includes live television broadcasts of New York productions from the 50s, revivals of classic works and experimental performances from the 60s and 70s, as well as important contemporary performances. Also includes new, international, and contemporary performances, ground-breaking documentaries, and critical instructional series for theatre and drama programs across the globe, including many new performances from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre collection (Opus Arte), Theatre Arts Films, the BBC, and TMW Media Group. Unlike Hollywood adaptations, these are the actual original productions, captured and recorded while performed for a live theatre audience. Plays range from classical Greek to the 20th century. Alexander Street Press

Provides a bibliographic index of short stories written in or translated into English that have appeared in collections and selected periodicals. 

Provides a bibliographic index of short stories written in or translated into English that have appeared in collections and selected periodicals from1915 to 1984. 

Provides full text of thousands of American poems from 1900 to present. Searchable by poet, by first line or title, and by keyword(s)in poems.

Provides full text of thousands of British poems from 1900 to present day. Includes works in English by poets from outside the British Isles, as well as significant translations of non-English poetry. 

Contains over 250 000 poems in full text and 450 000 citations. The poems in full text are the most widely-read in the English language, as well as in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. 

Provides diplomatic transcriptions of Herbert’s collection of poems known as The Temple as they are found in two manuscript versions and the first printed edition. High quality digital copies of both of the manuscripts and the first printed edition are available for viewing. All have been transcribed in modern English spelling. Users may look at any of the three versions alone, or the poems may be viewed individually or side-by-side to allow for comparison. The collection may be searched by keyword with results from each version displayed side-by-side and the searched text highlighted. Includes introduction and documentation.

Includes more than 80 volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842. The database also offers numerous biographical and critical essays prepared by leading scholars specifically for the project.

Contains complete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a paleography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and a large selection of color images demonstrating over 320 examples of 17th and 18th century English handwriting. The database is searchable in many different ways such as keyword, word in first line, word in last line, author, title, etc. Also the search may be limited by such criteria as verse length, verse form, date range, etc. Adam Matthew.

Provides full text of works of English, American, African-American, and Canadian poetry, English and American drama and prose, and full-text literature journals. In addition it offers some of the leading literary reference works and links to web texts. 

This digital collection, which includes the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, offers students and researchers of the Romantic period unique access to the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey. Also contains a collection of fine art pieces by such artists as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Benjamin Robert Haydon. All of the documents are digitized in colour and include: verse manuscripts, printed manuscripts, prose manuscripts, printed verse, correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps.

Includes the full text of 60 volumes of poetry by 47 authors who were Scottish women of the Romantic period. Accompanying the texts are extensive bio-critical essays, specially written for the database by leading scholars in the field, as well as selected criticism from the critical bibliography compiled by the editors. New content is added on a bi-weekly basis. Alexander Street Press.

Provides online access to 4,000+ historical newspapers from the United States and other countries, dating from the early 1700s into the 2000s.

Search the largest single collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century English news media available from the British Library and including pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers.

Provides access to full-text of British and Commonwealth magazines from the 19th century. 

Provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of British periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, with high-resolution facsimile page images. 

Draws on the manuscript collections of over 25 university libraries and special collections. This resource unites “. . . scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.”

Provides a digital archive featuring literary manuscripts dating from roughly 1120 to 1900. 

Access complete digital facsimiles of over 230 original manuscripts written or complied by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries- known as the Perdita Project. The manuscripts are from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA. The manuscripts include works of poetry, religious writing, autobiographical material, cookery and medical recipes, and accounts. Keyword and advanced search options. Search by title, date range, author, and role. Limits for source, document type, language and genre within document. Allows for proximity searching. Includes searching aid with list of authors. Adam Matthew Digital.

Includes medieval and renaissance manuscripts that date from the 11th and 17th centuries that are written in several languages and cover several topics.