About Literary Resources on the Net

This page is part of the Literary Resources collection maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers -- Newark. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

This set of pages is a collection of links to sites on the Internet dealing especially with English and American literature, excluding most single electronic texts, and is limited to collections of information likely to be useful to academics and students.

When I began this collection way back in 1993, I could aspire to be comprehensive — all the Internet resources on literature fit comfortably on a single quick-loading page. Things are now very different, with many thousands of resources varying widely in character, scope, and quality. It has forced me to be much more selective.

I'll start with exclusions. I don't include links to any of the following:

Commercial resources. I'll make links to commercial sites, but only if they provide substantial material for free. Simple descriptions of products and services that cost money won't cut it.
Most electronic texts. With tens of thousands of electronic texts on the Web, it's impossible for me to keep up with them. I make exceptions for eighteenth-century E-texts and the more interesting and sophisticated hypertext editions. For the others, Penn's Online Books Page and the Internet Public Library do a good job, and I don't want to repeat their efforts.
Single articles, lectures, &c. As with E-texts, the number of short articles, conference papers, and so on is now unmanageable.
Course syllabi. I'll make an exception when a course page promises to be useful to general readers, but most syllabi are really useful only to members of the class.
Collections of original creative writing. Poetry journals, collections of short stories, and so on are a welcome development, but they don't belong on this page.
Weak pages. Finally, I no longer include pages that strike me as weak in some way.

That last one requires special comment. I hope the most useful aspect — and I suspect the most controversial aspect — of these pages is the capsule reviews of the resources. I don't pretend to be an expert on every topic I index, and even in those few areas where I have the exertise, I rarely have the time to give a resource a thorough evaluation. I do, however, spend at least a few minutes poking around every resource, and I'm on the lookout for the usual signs of scholarly respectability: citations, standard editions, clear statements of editorial policies and so on. I then pass a brief judgment to let potential users know what to expect.

If you think I've given some page an unfair review, I'm willing to look at it again, especially if new material has been added. But I reserve the right to express my opinion, with the understanding that it's nothing more than an opinion. Note, too, that a description like "unscholarly" isn't necessarily a bad thing: different resources have their places.

The pages that strike me as the best examples of what Web-based scholarship can be are indicated with a Latin tag, O si sic omnes! — "If only they were all like that."

I do all I can to keep these pages up-to-date, but it's not easy. There are more than 1,400 links in these pages, and more than 4,500 in my related Eighteenth-Century Pages. With six thousand links, some are bound to go bad. Every few months I do a systematic sweep for dead links, although some inevitably get by me. Please feel free to bring them to my attention. More worrying, some sites change substantially, and my capsule review, based on an earlier state of the site, becomes obsolete. Once again, I welcome suggestions to revisit sites.

This page, part of the larger collection of literary resources, is maintained by Jack Lynch.