" Literature is the Thought of thinking
souls."
Thomas Carlyle
The Literary Resources section is a compilation of the most important
literary resources and links on the Internet for people who are interested
in reading, studying, researching, and teaching literature. If you know of
other in-depth and significant literary resources, please let us know,and
we will review them.
The following are general resources, focusing mainly on American and
English Literature.
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A Literary Index
- This site, maintained by Christopher J. Flack, a fourth-year doctoral
candidate in the English program at Vanderbilt University, "provides both
an overview and a review of the more significant collections of Internet
literary resources of interest to scholars, students, and lovers of
literature." It is very comprehensive and relevant to this section, and
also includes a section on Composition, Rhetoric, and Writing among its
annotated list of indices.
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Literary Resources on the Net
- A regularly updated list of literary resources, maintained by Jack
Lynch, a fourth-year PhD candidate in English Literature at the University
of Pennsylvania, from Bibliography and History of the Book to Women's
Literature and Feminism. The list of categories is not annotated, but
there is a search option.
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Literature Resources
- Links from George Washington University.
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The English Server
- At Carnegie Mellon University, this site is managed by the students,
faculty, and staff. An extensive collection of literary resources it has
"published humanities texts online since 1990, offering over fifteen
thousand texts." With links to other literary sites, like the Guide to
Literature on the Internet (a comprehensive guide to literary resources on
the Internet containing newsgroups, FAQs, electronic journals, resources
for writers, reference and WAIS resources), it has a search option along
with gopher, telnet, and ftp sites.
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American and English Literature Internet Resources
- Compiled by Winnie Shyman, reference librarian at Buley Library.
Though this site has not been updated recently, it contains an incredible
list of resources and electronic texts. It also contains biographical
information and criticism of works (listed alphabetically by author from
Austin to Wilde). American and English Literature resources include
general resources, poetry, prose, and drama. It is Shyman's intention to
include sites that have "stood the test of time and have proven to be a
storehouse of information for researchers in the literary field."
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The English-Language Literature Page at UCSD
- This is a great page at the University of California at San Diego
consisting of literature-oriented resources, primarily focusing on English
and American Literature, electronic texts and journals, discussion
groups, and literary research.
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World Wide Web Virtual Library
- Also known as the IBIC it includes sections on authors, publishers,
booksellers, libraries, mailing lists for readers, online books, and more.
There are also Usenet groups related to books. This is a "personal,
selective, opinionated guide to books and book-related resources on the
Internet," written and edited by W. Frederick Zimmerman at Sunsite.
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English Network Resources
- The links to this comprehensive index are regularly checked and
updated. The list includes
World Wide Web Literary Resources and Servers; electronic journals;
listservs and reference; writing, linguistics and language; online books;
children's literature; authors; and much more.
- Online Literary Criticism
Collection
- The IPL Online Literary Criticism Collection contains 1005 critical
and
biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by
author, by title, or by literary period. Literary periods range from
pre-1500 to 20th Century. Works included have been written by literary
scholars as well as works published under the aegis of some external
editorial body.
- The Voice of the Shuttle
- Web Page for Humanities Research, from UCSB. Massive site divided into
many categoryies. New links added every few days.
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The Zuzu's Petals Literary Resource
- This site contains over 2000 links to resources for writers and
researchers, including Zuzu's Petals Literary Links ("creative resources
from Zuzu's Petals Quarterly Online").
These are sites that are geared primarily toward online books and
electronic texts, that are not mentioned in the section above on
literature resources.
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Alex
- Alex is a catalog of electronic texts on the Internet, and was an
Oxford research project whose purpose was "to explore the possibilities of
creating catalogs of Internet-based electronic texts." Its 2000
approximate entries are mostly gopher servers. Maintenance has been
suspended due to lack of funding, but it is an interesting site,
nonetheless. You can browse the catalogue or enter a Boolean
query search.
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Electronic Texts
- Another literary index maintained by Jack Lynch! This comprehensive
list includes links to many electronic text projects, as well as gopher
sites and Usenet groups, including bit.listserv.gutenberg and
alt.etext.
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Internet Public Library Reading Room Online Texts
- This collection contains "over 4000 titles that can be browsed by
author, by title, by Dewey Subject Classification, or by keyword search."
This site is regularly updated and includes a Literature and Rhetoric
section.
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The On-Line Books Page
- This very impressive and comprehensive site includes an index of
thousands of online books, general English repositories, and specialty and
foreign-language repositories, as well as online book publishers and
retailers.
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The BookWire Reading Room
- This is a site with a great number of indexed electronic books and
book resources. It includes Literary and Author-specific mailing lists, a
Book Awards Index, and 79 sites listed on an index of
book-related newsgroups.
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The University of Virginia Electronic Text Library
- Organized by author, all of the thousands of SGML-encoded electronic
texts and images are available to users of the University of Virginia
(some materials such as the Oxford English Dictionary are resticted to UVA
use) and many are available to Internet users.
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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
- The complete works are freely available online. The original
electronic source for this server is the complete Moby (tm) Shakespeare.
The works are divided into the categories of Comedy, History, Tragedy and
Poetry. They mention that it's a "very common phenomenon" that a copy of a
play you may be familiar with may differ from one on this server. You can
also search the complete works. There are also
links to other Shakespeare resources on the Internet, Bartlett's
Shakespeare quotations, a Shakespeare
discussion area, a "what's new" page on this server, and their FAQs like,
"where on the Internet
can I find references, summaries, introductions, and critical analysis of
Shakespeare's work?"
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Women Writers Project
- The Brown University Women Writers Project. The textbase is a
collection of
primarily pre-Victorian (1450-1850) literature written by women.The
collection spans a wide array of
topics and genres, providing a unique and valuable resource for the study
of women's writing in English.
Other Shakespeare Resources
-
California Shakespeare Festival Homepage
- Useful Shakespeare resources and links to other Shakespeare resources
on the Internet.
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Collected Works of Shakespeare
- Complete works online and links to other Shakespeare resources. This
site also features a "Shakespeare Search Engine."
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Shakespeare Web
- Good for teachers of Shakespeare or for the needs of students who want
to interpret and criticize the works.
These include links that list literary institutes and English departments
worldwide.
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Voice of the Shuttle's Literature, English & Comparative Literature
Departments
- This web page is maintained by Alan Liu from the Department of English
at the University of California. It contains general guides to English and
Comparative Literature Departments in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Europe,
and the Far East. It includes English and Comparative Literature
Department Gophers Worldwide, 100 English Home Pages ("frequently visited
English department home pages")
by William C. Dowling at Rutgers University, a large list of English
Department Homepages by David L. Hoover at NYU, and U. Penn's ECLAT among
the alphabetical, unannotated list of English and Comparative Literature
English Departments. You can search the server in literature subjects by
genre, as well.
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Yahoo!'s List of Literary Institutes
- This is a somewhat annotated alphabetical list of English Departments
and Literary institutes, student programs, and links to Internet resources
for literature, rhetoric, linguistics, and women's studies.
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Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
- IATH's goal at the University of Virginia is to "explore and expand
the potential of information technology as a tool for humanities
research." This server is very frequently updated, and you can interact
with the institute. IATH also publishes the Internet's oldest
peer-reviewed electronic journal in
the humanities. Other annotated categories include Reports, Projects, and
Works in Progress; and Related Readings in the Humanities.
These resources include college-level informative sites for teaching
literature.
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Literature Resources for the High School and College Student
- The intent of this site is to provide a quick reference for
students to the many literature
and writing resources on the world wide web. The graphics on this site have
been kept to a minimum.
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World Lecture Hall: English and Writing
- A very in-depth alphabetical and annotated list of courses including
Shakespeare, English literature and rhetoric (both online and off-),
writing in cyberspace, and research methods. Frequently updated and
descriptive of the interactiveness of the sites with the Internet.
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Syllabi and Other Course Materials for Literature Courses
- In typical busy Lynch fashion, he says, "it should be no surprise that
this page is now woefully incomplete - the explosion of the number of
courses using the Web, along with the explosion in things I should be
doing, have made it impossible for me to keep up with it all." A
collection of syllabi and course materials that really use the Web.
Categorized lists of materials include Classical and Biblical, Medieval,
and Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries to name a few. Updated as Lynch can
get to it.
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Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures
- Maintained by Randy Bass, Director of the Center for Electronic
Projects in American Culture Studies at Georgetown University, the
Archives contain essays, syllabi, and bibliographies. A short list,
co-sponsored by the D.C. Heath Publishing Co., it contains essays on
Teaching the American Literature from the Heath Anthology Newsletter.
Leans toward muticultural studies.
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BookWire
- A searchable site that bills itself as "the First Place to Look for
Book Information on the World Wide Web" and "the most comprehensive guide
to the book-related resources of the Internet." For fun this site features
a literary Cartoon of the Day by Mort Gerberg. This is a great site that
includes, among many annotated categories, Book Awards, the Reading Room,
The BookWire Index, BookWire Navigator (BookWire hierarchies), Publishers
Weekly, and many other top-notch book reviews.
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AcqWeb
- For librarians and other information professionals interested in
acquisitions and collections development. Frequently updated with a
limited search capacity, since 1994 they've aimed to "be international in
scope and approach." Links to other sites, Web and gopher sites, and the
Directory of Publishers and Vendors.
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Association of American University Presses
- A short list maintained by Princeton University, AAUP is a combination
online catalogue and bookstore. It lists links to individual university
press catalogues at other Internet sites.
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BookLovers FineBooks and Literature
- Maintained and updated periodically by Piet Wesselman, this is his
"selection of useful places on the net on writers and poets, on libraries,
publishers and booksellers, both of new and second hand/antiquarian
books." Contains general sites on books and literature, literary journals,
and other literary links.
Updated May 17, 1999
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