Subject Guide » English Language and Literature
Electronic Full-Text Collections
37 resources available.
 - Restricted to WMU users  - Open Access
Literature Online (LION) A searchable full-text database of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, literary criticism from over 200 literature journals and various reference resources. Includes biographies, bibliographies, and links to Web sites.
LitFinder Full texts of selected poems, short stories, essays, plays and speeches. The PoemFinder features 125,000 full-text poems, 850,000 additional cited and excerpted poems, keyword and author searching, as well as biographies of poets and some critical interpretations. In LitFinder you can search by author or title but also by genre (e.g. children's literature, humor); by subject (e.g. nature, religion); and within author you can limit by time period, genre, and religious affiliation.
Chadwyck-Healy Literature Collections Full text of English and American poetry, drama, and fiction from different time periods. The Literature Online database organized by collections.
Project Gutenberg
About 20,000 public domain books (mostly pre 1923) are available for free in various formats, mostly plain text and HTML. Light literature (Zane Grey), heavy literature (Moby Dick), history and reference books are included. In English and 50 other languages. Links to Wikipedia entries on authors.
Academy of American PoetsA multi-media resource providing information on over 400 American poets, including biographical and bibliographical information, the full-text of selected poems, audio clips, and related web sites.
African-American Poetry (1750-1900)Nearly 3,000 poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To access scroll down the alphabetical list.
American Drama (1714-1915) Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama reflects 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 Clyde Fitch, Augustin Daly, David Belasco, James Herne and Joaquin Miller.
American Film Scripts Online Over 800 film scripts, as well as detailed information about the scenes, characters, and people related to the scripts. Searches can be restricted quite precisely--to criminal characters or interior urban settings in the 1950s, for example. You can also sometimes compare different versions of a film script.
American Poetry (1600-1900) Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.
American Studies at the University of VirginiaAmerican Studies at the University of Virginia is an incredibly rich scholarly project. The University of Virginia has long been the front-runner in electronic archiving, and this site is no exception. Its purpose is to represent the study of American culture in a media-enriched electronic format. It offers a wealth of American literature hypertexts and American paintings, as well as a wide variety of links to related American studies projects at the University of Virginia and elsewhere.
Asian American Drama Full text of 252 plays by 42 playwrights, with information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also included: selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Bartleby.com: Great Books Online
The full-text of numerous reference books, dictionaries, language usage books, and classic works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Black Drama, 2nd edition Full text of more than 1,300 plays from the mid-1800s to the present written by 200 African or African-American playwrights. Each play is indexed by keyword and by numerous subjects. Enhanced by reference materials, ancillary information and images.
Black Short Fiction More than 6400 stories and folktales by African, African American, and Caribbean authors. (When complete the collection will contain approximately 8000 works.) Most of the stories are in English, but some in French, Portuguese, and Gullah language are also included. Search by keyword, title, author, language and date.
Canadian Poetry Created in partnership with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, this collection currently contains the full text of more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets including Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Archibald Lampman.
Complete Works of William Shakespeare"...the Web's first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare." Based on the Complete Moby (tm) Shakespeare. Complete works can be searched.
Documenting the American SouthA collection of full-text sources on Southern history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century; hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
Early American Fiction (1789-1850) Provides both images and text for a well-defined and comprehensive collection of early American fiction. Presently includes 440 titles by 80 authors, including first printings of works by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Published jointly with the University of Virginia Library.
Early American Fiction (1789-1875) Provides 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 English Books Online EEBO consists of digitized versions of microfilms from two sets which WMU owns: Early English books, 1475-1640 (Microfilms AC 1 2nd floor, Waldo), and Early English books, 1641-1700 (Microfilms AC 2). Start with the EEBO search engine to locate a text. If it has not been digitized, search WestCat by title or author and use the microfilm. The English Short Title Catalogue 1473-1800 on CD-Rom (Rare Books Room CD Z 21) is a useful index to this source.
Early English Prose Fiction (1500-1700) Over 200 complete works in fictional prose from the period 1500-1700.
Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare (1591-1911)Eleven major editions from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, 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. To access scroll down the alphabetical list.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780) 96 complete works in English prose from the period 1700-1780, by writers from the British Isles. Includes a scanned version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
English Drama (1280-1915) A combination of Chadwyck-Healey's English Verse Drama and English Prose Drama full-text databases. 4,000 plays by 1,200 authors from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century.
English Poetry (600-1900) Essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.
English Poetry, Second Edition This contains more than 183,000 poems by over 2,700 poets, representing a comprehensive archive of English verse from the 8th century to the early 21st. Includes representative poems both of the literary heritages of Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries and of the poetic legacies of English writers who have only been brought back to scholarly attention during the last thirty years.
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 James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.
HarpWeek Full-text as well as images from the important American magazine Harper's Weekly. Coverage: 1857-1912.
King James Bible
The authorized version of the King James Bible for reference use when studying English and American literature. Fully searchable, includes full text with all introductory matter, annotation, calendars, genealogies and tables.
Latino Literature Contains more than 100,00 pages of poetry, fiction and drama by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States. Includes almost 400 plays.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 250 novels from the period 1782 to 1903, including works by all the major Victorian novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Eliot and Hardy, as well as the landmarks of Gothic and other fiction from the Romantic period.
North American Women's Drama Over 1,500 plays by 330 playwrights, with detailed information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. 30% of the plays have not been published before. Also included: selected playbills, production photographs, and other ephemera related to the plays.
Twentieth Century African-American PoetryA database of modern and contemporary African-American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. Features 10,000 poems by nearly 70 of the most important African-American poets of the last century. To access scroll down the alphabetical list.
Twentieth Century American PoetryThis collection includes 52,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Andrei Codrescu, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Cathy Song. To access scroll down the alphabetical list.
Twentieth Century English PoetryA collection of 598 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library. To access scroll down the alphabetical list.
Wright American Fiction (1851-1875)This collection of full-text American fiction includes some works by well-know authors like Mark Twain as well as many other works by lesser known authors.
Electronic Books and Other TextsLinks to Electronic Book sites and Electronic Text Collections compiled by WMU librarians. Some of these collections may be of special interest to students of literature.
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Last updated: March 2008
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