English Studies

• PUL Databases
• Full-Text Literary Works
• Full-Text Fiction Collections
• Full-Text Poetry Collections
• General Literature and Reference
• Literary Theory
• Scholarly Societies

Selected Purdue Databases for English Studies

• African-American Poetry. A collection of searchable and browsable full-text poems by African-American authors, based on William French et al., Afro-American Poetry and Drama, 1760-1975.
• America : History and Life. Includes information on the literature of the United States and Canada.
• ArchivesUSA. Information about primary source materials from over 5,480 US manuscript repositories. Searchable by repository name or name of collection.
• Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Use these to trace the genealogy of ideas by seeing who’s citing whom. The years covered are 1977-present.
• Biography and Genealogy Master Index. A good place to begin looking for biographical material on anyone. Does not contain the biographies themselves, but lists the biographical compendia where they can be found.
• Books In Print. A complete record of in-print and forthcoming books published or distributed in the U.S. Also contains profiles of publishers, wholesalers, and distributors, as well as book reviews for titles dating back to 1985.
• Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database. Contains records of books for children and young adults,with full reviews for many of these titles.
• Early English Books Online. (EEBO) Text-images of all books published in England from 1475-1700.
• ERIC. The premier source for education-related research, documents, and journal articles.
• Ethnic News Watch. A full-text general reference database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Has both English and Spanish language interfaces.
• Humanities Abstracts. A subset of the general Wilson Omni-File database, this is a good place to find full-text articles on all subjects relating to English Literature, including reviews of particular books, plays, and films. Access this by first clicking on the OmniFile Full Text Mega box at the top of the screen. A subject area box will then appear in the lower right hand corner. Highlight Humanities here before entering your search.
• International Index to Black Periodicals. Full-text content from current periodicals with back files for some. Covers a wide array of humanities disciplines, including African-American Literature.
• J-STOR. A good selection of searchable full-text journals in the humanities and social sciences. J-STOR's strength is in back issues; holdings generally begin at the journal's inception but stop a couple years short of the present.
• Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts. Covers all aspects of linguistics and the study of language: Speech, hearing, phonetics, interpersonal behavior, learning disabilities, nonverbal communication, grammar, morphology, semantics, history of languages, etc.
• Literature Resource Center. A good place to find biographical and critical material on individual authors. Contains full-text articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Contemporary Authors.
• MLA Bibliography.International coverage of the modern languages and literatures, including film and folklore. Indexes jounal articles and book chapters in all languages, as well as North American dissertations. Does not index book reviews.
• Oxford English Dictionary Online. The most comprehensive etymological dictionary of the English Language can now be searched on line for words within quotation and definition fields as well as limited to parts of speech.
• Periodicals Content Index Full-Text.(PCI). Indexes the contents of journals in the arts, humanities and social sciences from the inception of each journal (some going back to the 18 th century) to issues published as recently as 5 years ago. Links to the full text available for some journals.
• Philosopher’s Index. A good source of articles and books dealing with the relationship between Philosophy and Literature, as well as Literary Theory.

Selected Free Internet Databases

Full-Text Literary Works

• Romantic Circles: Electronic Editions. A good collection of scholarly electronic editions of works from the Romantic period.
• Oxford Text Archive. Several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora.
• University of Virginia’s e-book library. 1,800 publicly-available e-books for the MS Reader and Palm devices including classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, the Bible, Shakespeare, American history, African-American documents, and much more.
• Victorian Women Writers Project. Highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, including anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama.
• Australian Studies Resources. Digital editions of Australian literary and historical texts. Host to a number of other Australian Studies Resources.
• Library of Southern Literature. A collection of electronic texts by authors from the Southern United States.

Full-text Fiction Collections

• Wright American Fiction 1851-1875: A collection of the full-text 19th century American fiction, listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875

Full-text Poetry Collections

• Contemporary American Poetry Archive. An electronic archive designed to make out-of-print volumes of poetry available to readers, scholars, and researchers.
• HTI American Verse Project. An electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.

General Literature and Reference

• English Department Home Pages Worldwide.
• Bartleby .com A good selection of full-text online sources including reference books (.e.g., Bartlett's quotations from 1910, Columbia Encyclopedia, American Heritage Dictionary)

Literary Theory

• Critical Reading: An Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. A good basic introduction to Literary Theory for the novice.
• Introductory Guide to Literary Theory. Dino Felluga’s introductory guide addresses teachers as well as novices to literary theory and includes some contextualized definitions of terms.

Scholarly Societies

• American Comparative Literature Association
• Association for Computers and the Humanities
• MELUS:  The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
• Members of the Alliance of Literary Societies A linked list of societies devoted to the study of various aspects of literature, including specific authors.
• Modern Language Association of America.
• NCTE:  National Council of Teachers of English
• SHARP:  Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing
• The Society for Critical Exchange