A&M-SA Research Guides: British Literature Research Guide: Primary Sources &amp; Additional Resources

Examples of Primary Sources and Digitized Collections

20th Century English Poetry (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
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Incorporates the works of 285 of the most widely studied poets of the British Isles and beyond. Many of the major themes of 20th century writing – nationality, politics, war, sexuality, religion and gender – can be understood anew through this collection.
NINES: Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online (University of Virginia) This link opens in a new window
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A scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. Includes British and American works from the long 19th-century, 1770-1920.
19th Century British Pamphlets (JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
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Throughout the 19th century, pamphlets were an important means of public debate, covering the key political, social, technological, and environmental issues of their day. 19th Century British Pamphlets, created by Research Libraries UK (RLUK), contains the most significant British pamphlets from the 19th century held in research libraries in the United Kingdom.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) (Gale) This link opens in a new window
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Search over 155,000 books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and more published in the UK and elsewhere during the 18th century. Works are primarily in English, but works in other languages are also included.

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. These quartos are some of the earliest known copies of Shakespeare’s works. All date from pre-1642.
British Women's Romantic Poets
The British Women Romantic Poet's Project is producing an online scholarly archive consisting of E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women written (not necessarily published) between 1789 (the onset of the French Revolution) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Act), a period traditionally known in English literary history as the Romantic period.
Folger Shakespeare Library
"This database offers access to tens of thousands of high resolution images from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, and art. Users can show multiple images side-by-side, zoom in and out, view cataloging information when available, export thumbnails, and construct persistent URLs linking back to items or searches. "
Treasures in Full
This site compiled by the British Library allows the user to examine every page of rare historic works; compare different editions side-by-side; choose standard or magnified view; read supporting material by the library's curators and other experts.

Shakespeare in Quarto
Caxton's Chaucer
Gutenberg Bible
Magna Carta
Renaissance Festival Books
Victorian Women Writers Project
The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
William Blake Archive
Over the course of two centuries, respect for the prints, paintings, and poems of William Blake (1757-1827) has increased to a degree that would have astonished his contemporaries. Today both his poetry and visual art in several media are admired by a global audience. In the broadest terms, the William Blake Archive is a contemporary response to the needs of this dispersed and various audience of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections where Blake's original works are currently held.
Women in the Literary Marketplace
The books and letters in this exhibition present a cross section of writing by English women in the nineteenth century–a period when women entered the literary marketplace in unprecedented numbers. While many women wrote and published books before 1800, few British women planned careers as writers until the nineteenth century. And although there were notable and celebrated exceptions, women were excluded from most areas of literature until the end of the eighteenth century.

Suggested Websites

A Guide to Authorial London
British Library Digitised Manuscripts
English Renaissance in Context
Geoffrey Chaucer Website (Harvard University)
This site provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program, the English Department, and the Division of Continuing Education. (Others of course are welcome to use it.) It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages. At the moment the site concentrates on the Canterbury Tales, but the longer-term goal is to create a more general Chaucer page.
Norton Anthology of English Literature (Norton Topics)
- Features
• Annotated Texts and Contexts grouped by topic
• Over 1000 Illustrations
• Over 300 Explorations to stimulate critical thinking and generate paper topics
• Hundreds of Annotated Links to related sites
• Cross-references to the Norton Anthology of English Literature
• Connections with the Norton Anthology of English Literature
• Comprehensive Search
• The Norton Online Archive, a searchable electronic library of over 150 literary texts and downloadable audio files, annotated by the editors, to supplement the Norton Anthology
The Dickens Project
Victorian Web
The Victorian Web, in contrast, presents its images and documents, including entire books, as nodes in a network of complex connections. In other words, it emphasizes the link rather than the search tool (though it has one) and presents information linked to other information rather than atomized and isolated.

Using the Web

Things to keep in mind when searching the web:

Use websites only when appropriate and question their credibility. Remember, almost anyone can publish something online because it doesn't go through the same review process like books or articles.
Generally .gov, .edu, .org sites tend to be the most credible, though there are still exceptions. To limit your Google search to these domains, type in your search term followed by a colon with the domain name. Ex. population trends:.gov
When in doubt, ask your instructor if it’s okay to use a particular web source.

Videos

BBC Shakespeare Plays (Ambrose Video Publishing) This link opens in a new window
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Featuring some of Britain's most distinguished theatrical talent, these videos are an ideal choice. The 37 plays in this series include Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, and more.