ENGL Literature Research Guide: Web Resources

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books. This is a wonderful resource for 19th century children's literature and works by women and people of color.

*Our library catalog is working linking to Gutenberg's database. When you search for books, if they are in Project Gutenberg's database, they will appear with a link to Gutenberg in our database!

Serves as a resource for courses in Victorian arts and society. It contains links to Victorian texts and information on Victorian authors, art, architecture, design, religion, philosophy, politics, society, science, and technology.

This site is part of the Documenting the American South Collection of sources at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The site "includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924." This collection charts the development of southern literature from early pre-colonial days to the early twentieth century.

Electronic database for Whitman’s vast works available.

Open Source Shakespeare contains Shakespeare's complete works. It is intended for scholars and actors. OSS includes the 1864 Globe Edition of the complete works, which was the definitive single-volume Shakespeare edition for over a half-century. Features include a number of sorting and searching functions both on the home page and inside the plays, side by side sonnet comparison, and a concordance. This particular web page also has a mobile interface.

Images and typographical transcripts of love letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The text of the letters can be searched.

Collection of Audio recordings of 20th century poets, such as Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, and Denise Levertov. The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University is gradually digitizing its immense archive of 4,000 hours of recordings from 1954 to the present.

Presents information and online articles related to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), an American poet, and her writing practices. Offers access to writings generated by her works and writings that influenced Dickinson’s work. Includes contemporary responses to Dickinson’s legacy, writings by Susan Dickinson, and works produced by students in American poetry classes. Links to sites related to Dickinson.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts.

Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images.