I hope to work out a more impressive search engine one of these days,
but this will do the trick for now.
Note that some entries may appear more than once: for instance, when
they're found in both a regular page and the What's New page.
Send comments and questions to
jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu.
Original essays and links on Acker, Auster, DeLillo, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Hagedom, Morrison, Powers, Pynchon, Reed, and Rushdie. Some aren't yet available.
Biographical information on dozens of poets from the Great War. The biographies are brief but useful, and contain brief primary bibliographies. The pages are very graphics-intensive, and take a long time to load.
"These pages are meant to serve as a help section and resource center for the readers of Boyle's stories and books." Extensive, with bibliographies and news.
An extensive but unscholarly, even anti-scholarly, approach to "a great deal of as-yet-unpublished research into Joyce's notebooks and early drafts. They show him pursuing a detailed analysis of human psychology, in ways that should prove useful to artificial intelligence theorists as they try to build a simulated human personality."
An extensive site. "It is not a shrine, but rather an information centre. It is my intention that the Jeanette Winterson Site should be useful for those who have not read anything by Winterson yet, those who have read it all, students of literature, teachers and academics alike." Includes a biography, primary bibliography with summaries, reviews and criticism, original essays, and annotated links.
Originally a course page for a distance-learning project; now an archive of discussions, a brief chronology and primary bibliography, and excerpts from some of the women's works Woolf discusses.
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.
Extensive collection of American resources, including a superb collection of annotated links, on-line exhibits from the Museum for American Studies, many hypertext editions of American works, historical maps, the Capitol Project, virtual classrooms, and an extensive site on America in the 1930s. O si sic omnes!
Facsimiles of front matter of anthologies of early American literature from 1878 to the present, with attention to their role in shaping the canon. Well done.
Extensive collection of information on American authors, including a timeline, bibliographies, and many, many links. Well done, and a good place to start on American literature.
"A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction." A searchable database of thousands of books and articles. O si sic omnes!
Original essays and links on Acker, Auster, DeLillo, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Hagedom, Morrison, Powers, Pynchon, Reed, and Rushdie. Some aren't yet available.
Information on the Society, its publications, and its discussion list. Includes many useful links, including sites with images or transcriptions of early American periodicals.
An extensive site on the Sixties that provides back issues of Viet Nam Generation, information on conferences, bibliographies, filmographies, course syllabi, primary documents, personal narratives, &c.
A remarkable collection of thousands of full-text novels. Some are fully edited and encoded in HTML; others are page images or raw OCR. It will eventually contain edited texts of every American novel from the third quarter of the nineteenth century. O si sic omnes!
Scribbling Women (Public Media Foundation at Northeastern University)
"Online resources for teaching American women's literature using dramatizations produced by The Public Media Foundation." Includes links and RealAudio of well-produced thirty-minute performances, along with lesson plans and such. Very professionally done. Requires free registration (although they welcome donations). [Updated 28 Feb. 2005.]
Impressively thorough guide to 20th-c. Mississippi writers, major and minor. Includes list of works, biographical sketches, original essays, reviews, and links.
"This website provides information on Native North American authors with bibliographies of their published works, biographical information, and links to online resources including interviews, online texts and tribal websites."
"The story of Ambrose Bierce told in the language of his Devil's Dictionary, using hypertext language to create a fiendish translation of the life and works — and humour — of this acidic satirist and adventurer."
Extensive site by an authority on Buck, containing a biography, photographs, excerpts from her works, a secondary bibliography, and information on the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.
An impressive collection of material on Cather and her times, including reliable annotated E-texts, a biography, bibliographies, illustrations, and links. Very well done.
Extensive and impressively scholarly set of Fitzgerald resources, including biography, bibliographies, events, a chronology, quotations, and commentary.
"The clearinghouse for all things Ginsberg." A big site containing all sorts of Ginsbergiana, including poems, photos, interviews, articles, parodies, reviews, and tributes.
A first-rate collection of information (E-texts, biography, bibliographies, images, miscellaneous documents) on London, well organized and presented. O si sic omnes!
An excellent and extensive site on Pynchon's life (what little is known) and works. Coverage isn't comprehensive, but plenty of good stuff here, much of it not to be found elsewhere.
An extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works, including not only Sexton's books of poetry but also the first magazine publications of many of her poems. Very handy.
Electronic text of the novel, nestled among very extensive and intelligent contextual material, including reviews, illustrations, historical information, and even video clips of movie adaptations. Impressive from top to bottom. O si sic omnes!
Guide to Thoreau, including a general introduction, E-texts, a brief guide to some people mentioned in Thoreau's works, and links to other Thoreau sites.
"An overview with biocritical sources." Chronology, bibliography, photographs, and links. Well organized, but like all Geocities sites, irritatingly commercial.
An extensive "hypermedia environment for studying the works of the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman. The archive is a structured database holding digitized images of Whitman's works in their original documentary forms. Whitman's poetical manuscripts, early printed texts — including proofs and first editions — are stored in the archive, in full color when possible."
"An index of the names and brief biographical details and trade details of people who worked in the book trade in England and Wales and who were trading by 1851." Admirably scholarly.
A thorough guide to thousands of typefaces, including a series of questions to determine the name of a typeface. Not comprehensive, but very thorough and useful.
Information on the Society, with an introductory essay on descriptive bibliography by Terry Belanger, selected volumes of the Society's Papers, and links.
Note: Since these pages are concerned primarily with English and American literature, coverage of classical and biblical literature is sparse. Think of the selection as representative, not comprehensive.
"The project aims at integrating Latin inscriptions from all parts of the Roman Empire into an extensive database." Supporting material in German and English. Very ambitious and scholarly.
Brief biographical sketches on major literary figures in Latin literature, including Apuleius, Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Persius, Petronius, Propertius, and others.
"An ongoing attempt to provide a library of classical Latin (and Greek) texts with minimal redistribution restrictions." They disavow any intention of providing scholarly texts; "The intent of the project is to make available fairly good-quality texts at no cost; it is not to provide guaranteed top quality texts." With that provision they do a pretty good job, with texts of perhaps a dozen authors.
"A home page for miscellaneous materials relating to the culture of the Mediterranean world in late antiquity (roughly 200-700 C.E.)." Includes links and a reading list.
An on-line encyclopedia on the mythologies of the world, from the familiar (Greek and Roman) through the obscure (Latvian and Aztec). Entries are brief but often useful.
A critique of Joseph Campbell's approach to mythology in a dozen chapters "designed to investigate the myths as thinly cloaked chapter in an ancient Historical Tradition, which goes far back into the history of the Near East."
This page contains only those sites that address race, ethnicity, or national identity explicitly. Individual authors are listed on other pages — e.g., a collection of resources on Jewish-American writers appears here, but Chaim Potok is listed on my American page. Be sure, therefore, to check the American Literature page and the Other National Literatures page as well.
"a clearing-house for online information related to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the humanities." Includes a very useful catalogue of electronic theses.
"The purpose of the Model Editions Partnership is to explore ways of creating editions of historical documents which meet the standards scholars traditionally use in preparing printed editions." Includes "experimental mini-editions" on the First Federal Congress, the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Henry Laurens, Abraham Lincoln, Nathanael Greene, Margaret Sanger, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
"A study of hypertext technology, providing a guide to this rapidly growing field. We are most concerned with the implications of this medium for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity and univocity."
"This Guide does not have any pretence to be a comprehensive introduction to this complex area of digital resource creation, but the authors have attempted to highlight some of the fundamental issues which will need to be addressed."
A current list from the cfp@english.upenn.edu mailing list.
About These Pages
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 useful to academics — I've excluded most poetry journals, for instance.
"This hypertext document contains pointers to Internet-accessible files relating to the early church, including canonical documents, creeds, the writings of the Apostolic Fathers and other historical texts relavant to church history."
"Its aim is to provide scholars with an expanding library of information in electronic format on the medieval and early modern periods of European history, circa 800-1815 C.E." Contains information on historical prices and currency exchange.
About 200 usefully annotated links to about two hundred sites in Medieval European drama, including texts, bibliographies, articles, illustrations, and information on performance, costumes, music, and dance. Very extensive.
A set of course pages, with helpful information. Highlights are the full text of several medieval English plays, a Chaucer chronology, links on medieval medicine, and notes on Dante.
An impressive, ambitious, and very scholarly collaborative collection of resources, mostly for students, including an in-progress encyclopedia, a collection of electronic texts, bibliographies, and annotated links. "The Online Resource Book for Medieval Studies (ORB) is a cooperative effort on the part of scholars across the internet to establish an online textbook source for medieval studies on the World-Wide Web." First-rate.
A searchable index which "covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages." "MFI covers over 300 journals as well as many essay collections devoted in large part to topics dealing with women, sexuality, or gender. However, no year's worth of publications is completely indexed yet." Graphics-heavy.
Miscellaneous resources, many on UVa only, but some quirky things (audio files of spoken Old English, computer typefaces, &c.) not available elsewhere.
"An encyclopedic compendium of resources for the study of Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Now part of ORB, the On-Line Reference Book for Medieval Studies."
Provides "easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources." Free through January 1999, then available for a fee.
A collection of discussion boards for various aspects of medieval literature, including sections for Old English, Middle English, Old French, Latin, Old High German, and Old Norse.
"The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions." Dozens of glossed texts in Middle English, each with a good introduction.
An impressive collection of Middle English poetry, with translations and commentary. Very useful as an introduction to some of the major works of the period.
"Il Duecento è un archivio che raccoglie testi della poesia italiana antica, del periodo che va dalle origini fino a Dante. Nel corso degli ultimi anni, ho raccolto un grande corpus testuale, probabilmente il più grande archivio del genere, e comunque l'unico disponibile in rete." In Italian.
"A complex, scholarly, multi-media electronic archive containing a medieval manuscript tradition — that of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, ca. 1180)."
"The Vincent of Beauvais page aims to be an aid for scholars who are not directly involved in research on Vincent of Beauvais and his works, but who come into contact with Vincent while pursuing other research projects." Bibliographies, lists of papers, electronic editions, a newsletter, and information on current research.
Very extensive resource on Beowulf, with materials in several languages. Includes a full bilingual edition, an Old English glossary, original essays, and bibliographies. O si sic omnes!
"A full-color electronic facsimile of Cotton Vitellius A. xv. ... The archive already includes fiber-optic readings of hidden letters and ultraviolet readings of erased text in the early 11th-century manuscript; full electronic facsimiles of the indispensable 18th-century transcripts of the manuscript; and selections from important 19th-century collations, editions, and translations." Only samples are available on-line.
"An Internet version of the Julian Library Portfolio, a collection of booklets which began as a series of lectures given to Quakers on Medieval Mystics." Dozens of essays and links. Admirably extensive, though directed at the faithful rather than the scholarly.
"The long-range goal of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is the creation of a multi-level, hyper-textually linked electronic archive of the textual tradition of all three versions" of the text. A sample is available now, with essays on the project itself.
A good collection of humanities resources prepared by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The links are especially useful to primary and secondary school students, though some are more generally applicable.
"Both an overview and a review of the more significant collections of Internet literary resources of interest to scholars, students, and lovers of literature. This site is not intended to be an exhaustive index of all literary resources; rather it functions both as a descriptive meta-index to all things literary and as a review of the most important lists of literary resources and collections of literary links that proliferate on the Internet." Well designed, with useful reviews.
A collection of miscellaneous literary links, a chronology, and (most useful) tips on the Literature GRE, overviews of critical approaches, and other original essays.
"This website indexes on-line dictionaries, thesauri, and such like containing words and phrases. Preference in selection has been given to free online dictionaries of high quality. However, downloadable and subscription materials are listed if exceptionally rare and/or unusually well-executed." Dazzling.
"OPC provides both professional development for high school Language Arts teachers and a virtual teaching community enabling teachers across the country to access free poetry resources online." A valuable set of resources on teaching poetry and on hundreds of American poets, poetry centers and festivals, and "poetry-friendly bookshops."
"A collaborative effort designed to help people find reference information on folk ballads." A searchable database provides comprehensive references. Can be used on-line or downloaded.
A searchable collection of 1,800 Scottish broadsides from 1650 to 1910. Transcriptions and page images. Aimed at general readers, but also useful for scholars.
Annotated fairy tales, with historical and contextual information and bibliographies on further reading. Not scholarly, but well-informed and clearly written. Experts will find nothing new, but beginners will benefit.
Selections from a book which "looks at how inns, taverns, alehouses and pubs have appeared in literature from Chaucer to the present day." Includes bibliographies and extracts.
"A national service funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK's Higher Education Funding Councils to collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from research and teaching in the humanities. It will encourage scholarly use of its collections and make information about them available through an on-line catalogue."
A big compilation of many literary awards lists, including winners and those on short-lists. Not comprehensive, and it goes back only to 1990, but very useful.
Organized around a huge bibliography (in Adobe Acrobat format), cataloguing over 6,000 items on the history of religion, particularly strong on 17th- and 19th-c. Anglicanism. Shorter bibliographies on topics (the English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer), movements (Puritanism, mysticism), and people (Andrewes, Milton, Hooker, Tennyson, C. S. Lewis) are also available.
A teaching resource that collects English prose from Alfred in the ninth century through a U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1984. A valuable anthology, but the on-line version has no commentary.
"The IPL Online Literary Criticism Collection contains 1529 critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by literary period." Selected criticism and other resources.
An extremely impressive encyclopedia on thousands of literary figures, with original essays by prominent scholars. The contributions are scholarly but accessible. A superb place to start. O si sic omnes!
A collection of summaries of and annotations to art, film, and literature of medical interest, including Alcott's Hospital Sketches, Brontë's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Hawthorne's "Birthmark," Shelley's Frankenstein, &c.
A database of information on several hundred diarists from around the world, from the ninth century to the present. The information is brief but a good starting point for those doing research on diary-keepers.
"A listing of over 3300 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar." Links to thousands of libraries and archives.
Novelist and critic Crume provides very valuable information on hundreds of Scottish authors. Entries are brief but solid. Also a history of Scottish literature. O si sic omnes!
This page shows recent additions to the Literary Resource pages maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers – Newark. New sources will stay here for six months. Note that my Eighteenth-Century pages have a separate What's New page.
7 January 2006:
After an embarrassingly long delay, I'm getting around to making some updates. More should follow soon-ish.
A collection of discussion boards for various aspects of medieval literature, including sections for Old English, Middle English, Old French, Latin, Old High German, and Old Norse.
An impressive collection of Middle English poetry, with translations and commentary. Very useful as an introduction to some of the major works of the period.
"A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published."
A thorough guide to thousands of typefaces, including a series of questions to determine the name of a typeface. Not comprehensive, but very thorough and useful.
A big compilation of many literary awards lists, including winners and those on short-lists. Not comprehensive, and it goes back only to 1990, but very useful.
A database of information on several hundred diarists from around the world, from the ninth century to the present. The information is brief but a good starting point for those doing research on diary-keepers.
A huge bibliographical database on the religious backgrounds to English literature, focusing especially (but not exclulsively) on Anglicanism. There are also some shorter, more focused bibliographies. O si sic omnes!
I make no pretense to having a comprehensive collection of Internet sources in languages other than English: these are just a smattering. I also exclude most single-author pages.
An extensive "repository for information about Canadian writers, Canadian novelists, Canadian poets, Canadian playwrights, Canadian essayists, Canadian literary organizations, Canadian magazines, Canadian publications, Canadian books, Canadian texts and Canadian library archives."
"A digital library of primary sources in Canadian history from the first European contact to the early 20th century. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of literature, women's history, travel and exploration, native studies and the history of French Canada." Very extensive.
"The Digital Library of Dutch Literature is a growing collection of primary and secondary information on Dutch language and literature and its historical, societal and cultural context."
"Gateway to sites on the World Wide Web that contain substantial content in the various disciplines of the humanities in the area of Irish Studies. As a rule, commercial sites are not linked."
Searchable database of 1,300 early Italian texts. Free in 1998; a subscription fee will be required later. ARTFL subscribers receive it for no extra charge.
A comprehensive site on the North Frisian poet and novelist (1817-1888), including a biography, chronology, bibliographies, and information on his life in North Friesland.
STAR is Scotland's Transatlantic Relations. "Its goals are to facilitate links with existing groups in transatlantic studies, to enable connections between researchers and resources, and to engage in active identification of research projects and publishing ventures."
"A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published."
Information on the project "to publish electronic and computer-assisted editions of early dictionaries of English, French and Latin" and research on them.
A remarkable archive of materials on the English Renaissance, including tutorials and scanned texts. A very useful resource for anyone who teaches or studies the period.
Very extensive "Internetography on Renaissance intellectual history," collecting hundreds of annotated links on learning and the arts, 1348-1648. Searchable in many ways.
"This seminar project ... attempts to recover the connections between historical places and lyrics, to show the poems' attachments to material places and their social environs." Heavily annotated poems, including maps and sound files of the poems being read aloud.
"Its aim is to provide scholars with an expanding library of information in electronic format on the medieval and early modern periods of European history, circa 800-1815 C.E." Contains information on historical prices and currency exchange.
A fine collection of carefully edited Renaissance works, many in hypertext. Includes works by Addison, Alabaster, Bellamy, Camden, Campion, Fletcher, Milton, Owen, and others. Very impressive.
"A series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period." Only a few texts are on-line so far.
A collection of resources (most in German, some in English) on Early Modern history. Includes a discussion group, bibliographies, and several collaborative projects, including a collaborative dictionary on witch hunts. Impressive.
A collaborative essay on three masques: Jonson's Masque of Blackness, Middleton's Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, and Chapman's Memorable Masque. A single illustrated document (not hypertextual).
"This site provides an edition of Marlowe's works that begins to transcend the limits of print publication and exploit the flexibility of an electronic medium."
iEMLS reproduces Siemens's extensive bibliography, with useful commentary, from The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd ed. Over 300 items. Mighty impressive.
A good introduction for students, with texts of the plays, quotations, study guides, trivia, and so on. Unscholarly but usually informative. Still, littered with intrusive advertisements that get annoying.
"A collection of primary and secondary sources, including both texts and images, that illuminate the theater, literature, and history of Shakespeare, Shakespearean texts, theatrical production, and criticism, Furness Library resources are now being selectively scanned and mounted here to make them available for class and research use and to draw attention to the richer resources available in the Library as a whole." Very scholarly. O si sic omnes!
"The aim of the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to make scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays available in a form native to the medium of the Internet. ... The Library itself will contain fully refereed materials only, and in due course will be the core of the Editions; at present, however, there are no fully developed texts yet available."
A large introductory resource on Shakespeare's plays, including plot summaries, trivia, informal tips on reading, and so on. Not for scholars, but a good starting point for beginners.
"A sampling of resources and scholarly uses of the medium of the Internet, concentrating on early modern literary studies." Dozens of well organized and annotated links to early modern resources.
A massive index of thousands of Shakespeare resources on the Web. The site collects many automated searches, so the relevancy of the hits varies. Still, it's useful to have this much information in one place.
"This SOURCEBOOK aims to provide direct and comprehensive access to evidence and arguments related to the Shakespeare authorship controversy as it applies to Shakspere of Stratford and Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As much as possible, we will provide uncluttered access to original texts and documents with a clear presentation of Stratfordian and Oxfordian interpretations." In spite of the protestations, there's a marked leaning toward Oxfordianism.
"The purpose of the Society is to document and establish Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), as the universally recognized author of the works of William Shakespeare."
Tables of contents and sometimes introductions and prefaces from anthologies of 18th- and 19th-c. literature from the early 18th century to the present. Useful both for current pedagogical purposes (in comparing in-print anthologies) and for offering a historical view of the canon.
A collection of papers and presentations from 1996's MLA session on the Romantic canon and the Web. Edited by Alan Liu, with contributions by Laura Mandell, Joseph Viscomi, Jack Lynch, and Elizabeth Fay, and responses by Michael Gamer, Mori Saffran, and Steven E. Jones.
"This bibliography lists items (books, plays, films, etc.) that represent historical Romantic figures in fictional contexts." Several dozen works, some with brief annotations.
A clearinghouse for scholarship on 19th-c. British and American studies. A serious project put together by serious scholars, and deserving of attention.
Announcements and selected reviews of books in Romantic and Victorian studies since 1995. "Our goal is to be a comprehensive interdisciplinary guide to scholarship on nineteenth-century Britain. Therefore, we have chosen to define the period broadly in the interests of inclusivity."
"an annotated list of critical and theoretical works about the activity of canonizing as it arose during the Romantic Era, and about the concept of "literary period" that arose with it."
An extensive timeline of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Includes powerful search capabilities. O si sic omnes!
Romantic Circles (Neil Fraistat, Steven E. Jones, Donald H. Reiman, and Carl Stahmer)
The most important Romanticism resource on the Web. Features newly edited electronic texts, conference and publication announcements, and many other scholarly resources. O si sic omnes!
Overview of an in-progress volume in the ICLA Comparative Literary History Series, with useful bibliographies and links on Romantic prose across Europe. Admirably comparative.
A useful (but unannotated) bibliography of editions, biographies, and critical studies of Romantic topics and writers: Blake, Burney, Byron, Coleridge, Dacre, Hays, Hemans, Keats, Landon, Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth. The recommendations on overviews of Romanticism and topics such as the novel, women, the Gothic, and sensibility are especially extensive.
"Romantics Unbound is my attempt to connect teachers and students to the wealth of Romanticism material available on the Internet." Includes pages on Romantic writers, artists, musicians, and the Gothic.
Guide to Romantic-era anthropology, with profiles of Autenrieth, Baader, Brandis, Burdach, Carus, Doellinger, Ennemoser, Goerres, Heinroth, Ideler, Kieser, Leupoldt, Nasse, Oken, Schubert, Steffens, Troxler, and Windischmann, with more to come. Biographies, bibliographies, and some illustrations — all very impressive. In German and English.
A very handy annotated bibliography of editions, biographies, and important criticism on major Romantic figures: Burke, Barbauld, Smith, Blake, Robinson, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, de Quincey, Peacock, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Hemans, Keats, and Mary Shelley. The overviews of Romanticism are also useful.
"This archive assumes a deep relation between the intellectual and social movement of the Bluestockings, the culture and cult of Sensibility and High Romanticism. It is an archive of texts by or relating to the eighteenth-century British Bluestocking Circle and the second generation Blues, including predecessor texts, and literature of sensibility as it is derived from the Bluestockings' concerns with aesthetics, and with women's aesthetic achievements."
The goal is "to make fully searchable, peer-reviewed research available to all interested academics, scholars and researchers. ... Focuses on the 1,065 English belles-lettres titles — around 3,000 volumes — by women authors," 1796-1834. Now just bibliographical information, no full-text. Still, very extensive, very scholarly.
"This interactive hypertext uses Richard Polwhele's poem 'The Unsex'd Females' to introduce students and scholars alike to some of the British Romantic Period's foremost female contributors." Heavily glossed text of Polwhele's poem, with biographical material on the women mentioned in it.
"The Gothic Literature Page is devoted to study of Gothic Literature which flourished in England from 1764 to 1820. This site is intended to provide students and scholars of the Gothic novel access to the growing number of resources available on the web. An introduction to the Gothic novel, collected summaries, papers, critical and bibliographical information and related sites are assembled together to expedite research." Organization is haphazard, and the backgrounds sometimes make the text hard to read.
"A list of Gothic works read by the major writers of the period 1780-1830." Gothic reading lists for Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, with evidence that the authors read the books in question.
One of two class projects from a course called "The Novel of Sensibility." Discussions of Gothic psychology, female Gothic, the supernatural, and Gothic drama. Includes an annotated bibliography of several dozen secondary items, most published since the seventies.
"A Web site for all things concerned with literary Gothicism, which includes ghost stories, "classic" Gothic fiction (1764-1820), and related Gothic, supernaturalist, and "weird" literature prior to the mid-twentieth century." Includes links to other Gothic sites, reviews of books on the Gothic, and a great many links to E-texts. Extensive, but not always scholarly.
The most extensive Auten page on the Web, including texts (many with rudimentary annotations), a biographical sketch, a few images, a selected bibliography, as well as some jokes and other jeux d'esprit.
A brief but intelligent biography, with selections from her works and a bibliography of primary texts.
William Blake
The Blake Archive (Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi; Virginia)
The most important (and impressive) Blake resource on the Web. Superb reproductions of Blake's engravings and careful transcriptions of his text, with new works and copies of works added regularly. O si sic omnes!
Limited demonstration of "a hypertext interactive edition that displays the plates on a monitor or projects them on a screen. It allows the user to call up glossaries, critical intepretations, explications and magnifications of details, comparisons to other plates, and teaching exercises in print and audio modes."
"The site establishes Don Juan as the guiding spirit of a new educational tool for the exploration of European literature, art, religion and society in the 17th century." In French and English.
An astounding edition of Lyrical Ballads in its many editions, with collations, page images, a bibliography, and much more. What Web scholarship should be. O si sic omnes!
"William Hone (1780-1842) was a prominent radical writer, parodist, antiquarian and publisher during the early decades of the nineteenth century." The site consists of a biography, E-texts, and several bibliographies of primary and secondary works.
An extensive collection of material on LEL, including a biographical sketch, critical essays, a few texts, and a large bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
A great many E-texts of Peacock's novels and poetry, a complete list of works, biographical and critical excerpts, a chat group, and links. Very extensive.
"An unofficial list of all works by and about Mary Darby Robinson, divided into Primary Texts, Biographical Works, Critical Discussions and Other." Impressively scholarly.
An astounding edition of Lyrical Ballads in its many editions, with collations, page images, a bibliography, and much more. What Web scholarship should be. O si sic omnes!
Period-specific resources appear under the appropriate pages — Renaissance drama, for example, appears on the Renaissance page. But more general resources appear here.
"Designed to assist teachers, pre-service teachers and students in Drama and Theatre Arts. It will also assist anyone who wants to use Drama as a teaching strategy." A thorough and bustling site.
A big set of links and other resources for the history of the theatre. Well done.
Théâtrales (André G. Bourassa and Barry Russell, Univ. de Québec à Montréal)
A very scholarly collection of resources on French theatre throughout its history. "Une collection de textes et d'hypertextes en français sur le théâtre." In French.
Learned commentary on the works of the Frankfurt School, including Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Horkheimer, Habermas, Marcuse, Aggger, Best, Bronner, and Kellner.
A brief but clear intro to 20th-c. theory, including New Criticism, Formalism, Structurealism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and so on. Includes quick discussions and brief suggested reading lists.
"A website about the realtionship between the mass media and people's identities, genders and everyday lives." Includes bibliographies and original essays. Very flashy and graphics-heavy.
An E-journal on fiction theory, supported by dozens of other resources: original essays, links, discussiong roups, and so on. Very well done. In French.
An extensive, scholarly, and (appropriately) bizarre site devoted to Lacan, with bibliographies of his primary works (and those of Zizek, Miller, Ayerza, Fink, Copjec, and Badiou), a chronology of his career, links, and news.
This page is an experiment in highlighting some of the best sites in my Literary Resources pages. Every week or so, I'll feature a site which, in my opinion, shows the sort of things that Web sites should do. I'll keep an archive of previous touts.
Georgetown's Labyrinth is the definitive collection of on-line resources for the study of the Middle Ages. All aspects of medieval literature, history, art, and culture are included in these well-designed pages, with sections for professional information, teaching resources, and an extensive library of electronic texts.
"This site offers complete publication information for scholarly works on the British Romantic and Victorian periods. Here you can find authors, titles, publishers, prices, ISBN numbers and publishers' descriptions for new and forthcoming critical works, anthologies, and critical editions of nineteenth-century British materials. In addition, original reviews are available for selected works."
A clearinghouse for scholarship on 19th-c. British and American studies. A serious project put together by serious scholars, and deserving of attention.
"Devoted to exploring the problems of taste and aesthetics with regard to the Victorian canon and the literary canon as a whole." Information on courses and a bibliography of anthologies of Victorian literature. Very thoughtful. (Down?)
Very short biographies for Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Carroll, Collins, Dickens, Disraeli, George Eliot, and Gissing; a few poems; a guide to currency; quotations; a chronology; and links. Not scholarly and just getting off the ground, but promises to be useful.
"Victorian decorating ideas and information about the Victorian era. We offer you a wealth of information with regard to the Victorian era." Attractive, though perhaps too graphics- and music-heavy; unscholarly, but useful for beginners. Brief biographies of several Victorian authors. "Enjoy the music and ambience as you journey back in time."
An extensive and well-designed collection of information on Victorian culture and history. Bibliographies and essays on the social context, economics, religion, philosophy, literature, the visual arts, science, technology, politics, and gender. The entire collection is searchable, and includes good links to other sites. O sic sic omnes!
A fledgling "bibliographical and biographical database" of mid-Victorian letters. So far contains the correspondence of Anna Jameson and Harriet Martineau.
"The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). ... Considerable attention will be given to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate bibliographical descriptions of them."
A growing site, "dedicated to the development and exchange of theories and ideas referring to all aspects of the nineteenth century." Includes links, meeting information, and conferences.
An impressive look at the myths surrounding Carroll. "What this site chiefly about is the phenomenon of the 'Carroll Myth' as it has recently begun to be understood, and what we offer here is the first online resource for the major re-analysis of Carroll that has recently got under way." Includes biographies, bibliographies, and links.
A good collection of information on Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous creation. For fans more than for scholars, but still useful. Links, bibliographies, E-texts, and events.
A good, scholarly starting point, by an authority on Doyle, with many links to the stories and information on them and their pop-culture manifestations.
Big fan site, including "clip art, librettos, plot summaries, pictures of the original G&S stars, song scores, midi and mpeg audio files (which allow you to actually listen to the music), and newsletter articles."
Class projects in three coordinated Hardy classes at Gettysburg, Franklin and Marshall, and Dickinson Colleges. Biography, publication information on the novels, photographs of relevant locations, essays on cultural contexts, and links.
A big collection of information, including biographies, E-texts, book reviews, criticism, information on relevant journals, mailing lists, and Web resources.
Provides "news of Morris-related events and publications; information about the worldwide William Morris Society; materials relating to the life and work of Morris, his friends and followers; and links to other places of interest on the Internet." Includes a bibliography, a biography, E-texts, information on places, portraits, and reviews of books about Morris.
In-progress archive of Rossetti's textual and graphical works, undertaken with impressive care and erudition. "In an ideal imagining the Archive will hold a digital image of every textual and pictorial document relevant to the study of Rossetti." O si sic omnes!
Women authors appear throughout these pages, and "women authors" is a subhead under most of the period-specific pages. This page is devoted to sites on women's literature, feminist criticism, and gender studies generally.
Very extensive, though occasionally superficial, guide to works by women around the world and through the centuries. Includes some useful bibliographies and biographical information. The breadth is more impressive than the depth.
The goal is "to make fully searchable, peer-reviewed research available to all interested academics, scholars and researchers. ... Focuses on the 1,065 English belles-lettres titles — around 3,000 volumes — by women authors," 1796-1834. Now just bibliographical information, no full-text. Still, very extensive, very scholarly.
A fledgling project "designed to provide students with unfamiliar texts written by women and to supply essential background and ancillary materials for the writers and their works." Not much there yet.
"A searchable database providing access to over 5000 records pertaining to feminist theory, feminist literary criticism and gender studies focusing on English and American literature." In German and English.
"Online resources for teaching American women's literature using dramatizations produced by The Public Media Foundation." Includes links and RealAudio performances.
An "interactive hypertext [that] uses Richard Polwhele's poem 'The Unsex'd Females' to introduce students and scholars alike to some of the British Romantic Period's foremost female contributors."