Literatures in English: British and Irish Literature

Searchable images of manuscripts, letters, diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other similar literary materials.

"Updated in spring 2015, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online now contains a wealth of additional content, including the recently discovered diary of Jonson's 'Foot Voyage' to Scotland, extra letters written to Jonson, early attempts at a biography, further material relating to the masques and poems and numerous contemporary references to Jonson's works and reputation (Cambridge)."

This resource "explores the study and analysis of gender, leisure and consumer culture; one of the most vibrant areas of social, cultural and intellectual research, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. This exciting collection of original source material from the Britsh archives enriches the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology, education and cultural studies from a gendered perspective (Adam Matthew)." Key topics can be explored in five thematic areas: 1) Conduct and Politeness; 2) Domesticity and the Family; 3) Consumption and Leisure; 4) Education and Sensibility; and 5) The Body.

A complete record of surviving Old English except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts.

Search or browse the library's collections in Drama Online, including play texts, filmed performances, master classes, documentaries and more.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and Thomason Tracts (1640-1661). For help using the new version on the ProQuest platform visit: https://proquest.libguides.com/eebopqp

Eleven major editions from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, twenty-four separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha and related works and more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Based on The English Short Title Catalogue, this collection includes the holdings of the British Library as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Search the full text of over 2200 texts from Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

"Delve into the theatrical world of eighteenth century society and explore how the Larpent plays reflect the politics of the time, the role of women, views on race and religion, opinions on empire, and European and British history.

Eighteenth Century Drama features three distinct areas:
- Primary source documents; the focus of which is the Larpent collection of plays and Anna Larpent's Diaries
- The London Stage Database; and
- The Biographical Dictionary Database (Adam Matthew)."

96 complete works in English prose from the period 1700-1780, by writers from the British Isles. Includes a scanned version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Electronic Enlightenment is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world's great historical “conversations”.

English Poetry, Second Edition contains over 183,000 poems, essentially comprising the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th. Drawn from nearly 4,900 printed sources, more than 2,700 poets are represented.

A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.

This is a searching tool that is a convenient way to "search across Gale Primary Sources from a single, powerful interface (Gale)."

"The Grand Tour was a rite-of-passage for many aristocratic and wealthy young men of the eighteenth century: a phenomenon which shaped the creative and intellectual sensibilities of some of the eighteenth century's greatest artists, writers and thinkers. These accounts of the English abroad, c1550-1850, highlight the influence of continental travel on British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy. This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to compare a range of sources on the history of travel for the first time, including many from private or neglected collections. We include letters; diaries and journals; account books; printed guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings and sketches; architectural drawings and maps. The Grand Tour is a wonderful source of information about daily life in the eighteenth century, highlighting such everyday issues as transportation, money, communications, food and drink, health and sex. The material also covers European political and religious life, British diplomacy; life at court, and social customs on the Continent, and is an invaluable resource for the study of Europe's urban spaces. There is a wealth of detail about cities such as Paris, Rome, Florence and Geneva, including written accounts and visual representations of street life, architecture and urban planning (Adam Matthew)."

"Historic Literary Criticism is a collection of over 20,000 historical contemporary reviews, essays and commentary related to more than 500 influential authors from the 17th to the early 20th century. The content comes from a range of sources such as contemporary periodicals as well as published and unpublished letters. The cornerstone of the collection comes from the renowned Critical Heritage series from Routledge (ProQuest)."

This database combines the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), a key literature index, with over 355,000 fully searchable literary texts and many literary reference works including Cambridge Companions to Literature, New Essays on the American Novel, and ProQuest Study Guides. LION incorporates the Black Writing and World Literature collections from ProQuest.

Primary source research collection for Victorian literature, supplemented with critical and historical resources.

"This path-breaking project offers literary scholars the opportunity to examine complete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection... These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with the powerful BCMSV database... The database includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection (Adam Matthew)."

"The collection includes the registers of entries of copies which were used to establish publishers', booksellers' and eventually authors' copyright until the introduction of automatic copyright in 1912. Mapping the origins of copyright, the registers are key sources for the study of publishing in early modern England, and include historic entries such as Shakespeare’s First Folio (included on p.69 of Liber D November 8th 1623). The Company’s records also document the life of one of the world’s longest running publishing companies, the English Stock (1603-1960), which held the monopoly for many years over a number of popular and frequently re-published works (Adam Matthew)."

Lit Finder indexes thousands of poems, stories, plays, speeches, and essays and includes the fulltext for many titles indexed.

250 novels from the period 1782 to 1903, including works by all the major Victorian novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Eliot and Hardy, as well as the landmarks of Gothic and other fiction from the Romantic period.

These documents are from the historic John Murray Archive and encompass travel writing, history, politics, poetry and the literary luminaries who shaped it (Adam Matthew).

"The site features authoritative online editions of original work by important writers and philosophers in the humanities (Oxford University Press)."

Digital versions of the writings of many writers and philosophers. Texts are taken from definitive print sources.

"This resource is produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. 'Perdita' means 'lost woman' and the quest of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were 'lost' because their writing exists only in manuscript form (Adam Matthew)." This resource includes over 230 manuscripts from 15 libraries and archives in the UK and North America: works of poetry, religious writing, autobiographical material, cookery and medical recipes, and accounts. Contextual essays from academics working in the field, as well as biographical and bibliographical resources, are also included.

"Discover the working methods of Romantic poets and trace the evolution of celebrated verse in this powerful digital resource. Presenting the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, this digital collection offers ... unique access to the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey... All of the documents are digitised in colour and include: verse manuscripts, printed manuscripts, prose manuscripts, printed verse, correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps (Adam Matthew)."

"Shakespeare in Performance showcases rare and unique prompt books from the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries (Adam Matthew)."

A collection of 594 volumes of poetry by 282 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library.

Full-color scans of underground comics, comix and graphic novels from the 1950s to current times, including rare works and pre-Comics Code works. Also includes commentary and scholarly writing.

A product of the Women Writers Project, WWO includes the several hundred texts from women authors from 1400 through 1850. Introductions to the works, contextual and topical essays also are available.

This database is the first complete electronic edition of Yeats's work, and places his poetry in the context of his other writings.

"The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, has been available on CD-ROM for many years: changing technology has led to it becoming unusable for some readers - particularly those using Windows 7 and Mac systems. This pdf version, created by John Krug (Library Systems Co-ordinator, Lancaster University) and Jen Shepherd (Ruskin Library and Research Centre), makes it available to all once again."