LibGuides: English Literature: Fiction &amp; Prose Resources

Medieval Literature

Dictionary of Old English: Old English Corpus
Access every surviving Old English text and millions of words of Old English and Latin.

The Dictionary of Old English Corpus is an online database consisting of at least one copy of every Old English text. In some cases, more than one copy is included, if it is significant because of dialect or date. As such, the DOEC represents about three million words of Old English and another two million words of Latin.
British Literary Manuscripts Online
This unique collection provides an intimate look into the lives and works of more than one thousand authors and delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement.
Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature
Provides searchable access to the corpus of Latin literature produced in Celtic-speaking Europe, 400-1200 AD

The Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature (ACLL) is a full text database of the corpus of Latin literature produced in Celtic-speaking Europe from the period 400-1200 AD / CE. It includes more than 400 Latin works spanning the fields of theology, liturgy, computistics, grammar, hagiography, poetry and historiography, and including legal texts, charters, inscriptions, and more. This resource is part of Brepols Latin Complete and may be cross-searched via the Cross-Database Search Tool.

Medieval Travel Writing
A collection of manuscripts, focusing on journeys to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia

This collection-presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia.
Middle English Compendium
Contains three Middle English electronic resources: the Middle English Dictionary, the Bibliography of Middle English prose and verse, and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

The Middle English Compendium is comprised of an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.

Early Modern Literature

British Literary Manuscripts Online
This unique collection provides an intimate look into the lives and works of more than one thousand authors and delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement.
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Provides access to page images of printed work from the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.

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
Provides access to rare texts inaccessible in print form together with early editions of all the best-known works of fictional prose from the period 1500-1700

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.
Perdita Manuscripts, 1500-1700
Contains manuscripts that were written or compiled by women in the British Isles, 16th-17th centuries.

1500-1700; the manuscripts in this site were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they have been sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA. One of the key attractions of the Perdita Manuscripts is that it brings together little-known material from widely scattered locations.

Library resource guide for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
Additional resources for studying Renaissance and Early Modern literature and history.

Eighteenth-Century British Literature

British Literary Manuscripts Online
This unique collection provides an intimate look into the lives and works of more than one thousand authors and delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
A fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and more in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. ECCO is a digitization of the eighteenth-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project records all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. It also catalogues material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories.
Eighteenth Century Fiction
A collection of works by writers from the British Isles from the period 1700-1780

A collection of 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.
Eighteenth Century Journals: A Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals, c1685-1835
Provides access to rare journals about eighteenth-century social, political and literary life, 1685-1835

c.1685-1835; bringing together rare journals, this resource illuminates all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Topics covered are wide-ranging and include colonial life, provincial and rural affairs, the French and American revolutions, reviews of literature and fashion throughout Europe, political debates, and London coffee house gossip and discussion.
European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection

Includes the full text of more than 95,00 English, French, and German works of literature published between 1790 and 1840.

Victorian British Literature

British Literary Manuscripts Online
This unique collection provides an intimate look into the lives and works of more than one thousand authors and delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement.
European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection

Includes the full text of more than 95,00 English, French, and German works of literature published between 1790 and 1840.
Literary manuscripts. Victorian manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library
Provides access to unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings trace the inspiration and genesis.

Unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings trace the inspiration and genesis behind the periods 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.
London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld
A full text searchable resource, containing images of rare books, ephemera, maps, 18th- early 20th century

London Low Life is a full text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London.
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries
Brings together 105,000 pages of the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
NINES
Discover 900,000 peer-reviewed digital objects relating to 19th century scholarship from 146 federated sites.

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. Their activities are driven by three primary goals:
to serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), both British and American;
to support scholars priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials;
to develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis. [This resource is publicly available.]
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Primary source collections of the 19th century, covering the age of industrialization and technological innovation, political revolution, colonialism, nation building, educational reform, and other topics.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online is focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally beginning in spring 2012. The nineteenth century was the first great age of industrialization and technological innovation. It was an age of political revolution and reform, nationalism and nation building, the expansion of empire and colonialism, growing literacy and education, and the flowering of culture both popular and high. It was an age that witnessed the development of the power-driven printing press and the massive explosion of written material that dwarfs the output of the centuries that preceded it. Any undertaking that attempts to synthesize the vast array of nineteenth-century content may be at best only provisionally comprehensive.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Provides access to 250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s.

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 Bronts feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children's literature.
Victorian Popular Culture
The Victorian Popular Culture portal is an essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Victorian Popular Culture is a portal comprised of four modules, inviting users into the darkened halls, small backrooms, big tops and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic, spiritualist sances, optical entertainments and the first moving pictures.

Twentieth-Century British Fiction

British Literary Manuscripts Online
This unique collection provides an intimate look into the lives and works of more than one thousand authors and delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement.
Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
The purpose of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is to reunite the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works in a digital way, and to facilitate genetic research: the project brings together digital facsimiles of documents that are now preserved in different holding libraries, and adds transcriptions of Beckett's manuscripts, tools for bilingual and genetic version comparison, a search engine, and an analysis of the textual genesis of his works.

American Literature

American Fiction, 1774-1920
Contains prose fiction including novels, short stories, romances, fictitious biographies, travel accounts, and sketches for exploiring the development of American literature, through World War I.

American Fiction, 1774-1920 contains more than 17,800 titles and is comprised of prose fiction written by Americans from the political beginnings of the United States through World War I. It allows researchers to explore the development of American literature in a changing culture through novels, short stories, romances, fictitious biographies, travel accounts, and sketches.
Black Short Fiction and Folklore
Brings together 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present.
Black Women Writers
Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora.
Early American Fiction 1789-1875
Search and view facsimile images of 400 works of American prose fiction, 1789-1875

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
Provides access to books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals published in America from 1639-1800

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.
Provides access to books, pamphlets, and broadsides published in America from 1801-1819

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: Series I, this rich primary source database, based on the authoritative bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and now supplemented by thousands of new items, thoroughly chronicles the people, ideas and events behind the early political, social, cultural and geographic growth of the United States.
Literature, Culture and Society in Depression Era America: Archives of the Federal Writers' Project
This collection presents the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) publications of all 47 states involved in the project, which ran from 1933 to 1943

PEN American Digital Archive
An organization that seeks to promote and preserve freedom of expression and literature, PEN's online archive contains audio and video from lectures, panels, and discussions collected since 1966.

Southern Literary Messenger: Literature of the Old South
Comprises, in its entirety, the Primary Source Media microfilm collection entitled Southern Literary Messenger. This literary magazine was published from 1834-1864 and includes much material about slavery and secession.

Additional Resources

Caribbean Literature
Caribbean Literature is a body of work that is essential for the study of the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora.
JSTOR Lives of Literature
Provides access to advanced literary studies and interdisciplinary research on writers and texts critical to curricula in literature, current.

Current; JSTOR Lives of Literature supports advanced literary studies and interdisciplinary research on writers and texts critical to curricula in literature and broadens the range of authors and texts covered on JSTOR.
Literature Online (LION)
See ProQuest One Literature.
Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive
Provides access to the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the history of bookbinding, 1554-21st century.

1554-21st century; the Stationers Company Archive is an important resource for understanding 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.
ProQuest One Literature
A comprehensive collection of primary texts, contemporary and historical criticism, reference sources, full text journals, and audio and video by and about authors from around the world. Search the ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) index of bibliographic citations for literary criticism here. Formerly Literature Online (LION).
Women Writers Online
Provides access to full transcriptions of texts, with a focus on materials that are rare or inaccessible, 1400-1850.

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.