Research Guides: English Language and Literature: American & British Lit

American Literature

African-American Poetry from Chadwyck
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A collection of over 2,500 poems. It provides a survey of African American poetry from the earliest published African American poems to the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The bibliographic basis is William French's Afro-American Poetry and Drama 1760-1975.
America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1922 from Readex
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Cover-to-cover reproductions of 1,000+ US newspapers in PDF. Restrict searches to dates/eras, article types (news & opinion, election returns, letters, poetry/songs, legislative, prices, advertisements, matrimony & death notices), region/state, and newspaper name. Includes the digital versions of the Early American Newspapers microforms collection, African American Newspapers 1827-1998, and a collection of Virginia newspapers (labeled Selected Historical Newspapers).

Full page images from 270 newspapers published in 36 states, including rare and historically significant 19th-century titles that are full-text searchable. Individual pages or entire issues can be downloaded as PDFs. This archival collection offers insights into African-American history, culture, daily life, and attitudes and like many newspapers, provides articles on all subject areas
APS - American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900 from ProQuest
APS indexes over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including scholarly, special interest, and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals. Covers all academic disciplines including the sciences, though news and literary magazines are most prevalent. An excellent source of primary documents. Full text provided in HTML and PDF.

African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century
"An essential collection of 41 full length books representing several genres such as autobiographies, poetry, novels, compilation of slave testimonies, and memoirs. Authors range from the famous like Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Mary Prince, to the anonymous “Old Elizabeth.”"

British Literature

British Periodicals Collection I & II from ProQuest
British Periodicals is a collection of digitized periodicals covering the humanities, performing arts, history, science, architecture, and especially literature. Documents are available as high-resolution images and downloadable PDFs. Browse individual journals or search across the collection. All content is indexed, including advertising. Searches can be limited to multimedia types, including maps, illustrations, comics, photos, and music scores. 1681-1939.
EEBO: Early English Books Online
Early English Books Online contains scanned page images (GIF and TIFF) of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Coverages includes all subject areas with strong coverage in the humanities, performing arts, and education. Each is full-text searchable.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online from Gale
ECCO provides full-text books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, directories, Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements in HTML and PDF. It delivers every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
English Poetry, Second Edition
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Full texts of more than 1,500 works by around 450 named and approximately 230 anonymous works.
Shakespeare Survey Online from Cambridge
Shakespeare Survey Online is the electronic version of the annual yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production, which has been published since 1948. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains reviews of that year's textual and critical studies, and of the year's major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs.
Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1990
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals indexes citations of periodical articles, including the authorship of articles and a bibliography of articles written by each contributor, and using each pseudonym. Citations of evidence are provided to support attributions of authorship, along with brief biographical and vocational details. Each indexed publication is thoroughly described. Some citations link to full text from other C19 databases.

Periodical publishing in the 19th century was both voluminous and multifarious. Any and all aspects of contemporary thought were represented through this burgeoning medium, from which many eminent novelists and journalists emerged.

The scholarly importance of this material created an imperative to provide indexes through which it could be accessed. Poole's own subject index was created in response to this need. However, until 1965 and Wellesley, there was no author index. The primary objective of Wellesley was to assist scholars in assessing the significance of periodical articles by delivering accurate information on provenance. This was a monumental undertaking, given that the vast majority of articles published in Victorian periodicals were anonymous or pseudonymous.

Wellesley then, is an index to the authorship of articles, and a bibliography of articles written by each contributor, and using each pseudonym. Citations of evidence are provided to support attributions of authorship, along with brief biographical and vocational details. 45 important monthly and quarterly titles are included, covering the period from the beginning of the Westminster Review in 1824 to the end of the century. The exception to this is the Edinburgh Review, which is indexed from first issue, in 1802. Wellesley does not index poetry.