LibGuides: Comparative Literature: Primary Sources Online

African Languages

For databases relating to African languages and literature, please see this subject guide:

Africana Studies

Pauline Epistles: Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy. Ethiopian, 15th century. Luna Collection.

Ancient Languages

For database relating to ancient languages and literature, please see these suibject guides:

Iliad manuscript fragment. Egyptian, 3rd-4th centuries.Luna Collection.

Asian Languages

For databases relating to Asian languages and literature, please see these subject guides:

Sutra of Buddha's Names. From Dunhuang.. Early 10th century. British Museum. Luna Collection.

English Language

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)
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The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature covers monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards.
Early American Fiction 1789-1850
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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
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Early American Fiction 1789-1875 offers the full text of 875 first editions of American novels and short stories by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, as well as a host of minor writers of the period.
Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800) Digital Edition
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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 American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819): Shaw-Shoemaker, Digital Edition.
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Ongoing, Shaw-Shoemaker covers every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States. Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. The continuation of Readex's Early American Imprints:
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
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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.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) Text Creation Project
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Fully searchable electronic texts of 40,000 of the 100,000+ titles in Early English Books Online (EEBO) are being made available through this Text Creation Partnership. These editions are presented in a modern format that can be accessed by topic, by date, by type of material, and various other parameters.
Early English Prose Fiction
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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.
Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare
Eleven major editions from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-66, twenty-four separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected Apocrypha and related works and more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
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Based on the English Short Title Catalogue, Eighteenth Century Collections Online includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. It contains works published in the UK during the 18th century plus thousands from elsewhere. ECCO is primarily in English, but does include other languages.
Literary manuscripts. 17th and 18th century poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds
The database includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection. Alongside original compositions are painstakingly copied verses, translations, songs and riddles. The whole collection is situated within an assortment of manuscripts, some entirely dedicated to poetry, while others contain medicinal recipes, household accounts, draft letters, musical scores and plays. There are also several printed works, with handwritten verse additions.
Literary manuscripts. Victorian manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library
Unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings trace the inspiration and genesis behind the period’s greatest works. Researchers and students can trace the close interconnection of these Victorian authors – and subsequently their texts – through the mass of personal correspondence between them, revealing the close circles in which the Victorian literary world moved.
Literature Online (LION)
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Literature Online is a fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries
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Colonial-1950.
Includes approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, plus 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Includes materials from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings.
Women Writers Online
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1400-1850.
Full text collection of writing by women in English. Includes a wide range of subjects and genres.

The Edgar Allen Poe's shrine (oldest house in Richmond). Postcard, 1927. Harris Collection.

European Languages

Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, funded by German federal, state, and local governments, serves as a portal to works from Germany's cultural and scientific institutions. Works include books, archival objects, images, film, music and sound. Currently, over twenty million objects are indexed on the site, nearly eight million of which include digitized media. Copyright information and licensing rights will differ according to participating institutions. The site is searchable in German or English.

For other databases relating to European languages and literature, please see these subject guides as well as resource below:

Literary Authors from Europe and Eurasia Web Archive
Curated by librarians from the Ivy Plus Confederation. "The project aims to archive web content related to literary authors (of both fiction and non-fiction essays), translators, critics, and publishers...with the aim of preserving the history of the contemporary literary process as reflected in the non-print publishing activity of important literary figures and organizations."
French and Francophone Studies
German Language and Literature
Haitian Studies
Italian Studies
Latin American, Iberian, and Caribbean Resources
Modern Greek Studies
Slavic Languages

Alexander Longinov. Tale of the Cock and the Fox. 1852. Luna Collection.

Middle Eastern Languages

For databases relating to Middle Eastern languages and literature, please see these subject guides:

Solomon ben Raphael. Bible. 1299. Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Luna Collection.