Academic Resources

General

Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB or MLA) The largest index to scholarly literary criticism. The web version reproduces almost all the entries of the print and now covers 1926-present. Direct links to articles contained in JSTOR and indexing for all of them. Does not include most book-length works, so use online catalogs and Essay and General Literature index too.
Annual Bibliography of English Langauge and Literature (ABELL) Indexes literary criticism and book reviews of scholarly works about literature written in English. Web version covers 1920-present.
Essay and General Literature Index Essay and General Literature Index is most useful for collections of essays which MLAIB has traditionally not covered very thoroughly. The paper version begins with 1900; the web version covers 1985-present.
Project Muse (Johns Hopkins Univ) Contains full-text of an ever-expanding list of scholarly journals. Includes such standards as ELH, Postmodern Culture, and New Literary History. Can search the text.
JSTOR Archive of back issues of scholarly journals in various disciplines.
American National Biography
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism The Guide presents a comprehensive historical survey of literary theory and criticism, providing entries on critical schools and movements, critics and theorists, and terms, along with references and bibliographies for further research.
Electronic Poetry Center A central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics that makes available a wide range of resources centered on digital and contemporary formally innovative poetries, new media writing, and literary programming.
Arcade An on-line Literature & Humanities salon.
Association for Scottish Literary Studies An educational charity that aims to promote the study, teaching and writing of Scottish literature, and to further the study of the languages of Scotland. It includes links to the Scottish Literary Review, scholarly work related to languages of Scotland and new writing published in Scots, Gaelic and English.
Research Hub
Research Hub is designed for collaboration. Quickly create sites for your research teams and projects, or simply share files with a co-author. Built-in wikis, blogs, discussion forums and other tools support group communication. Roles and permissions allow teams to divvy up organizational tasks and keep private files private. Use Research Hub to upload files from your desktop, enabling you and your colleagues to work from a common resource pool and ensuring that everyone is making changes to the most up-to-date version. Apply advanced capabilities to transform and move content, creating review and publication workflows with editorial controls and notifications.

Writing Tools

Strunk, Elements of Style A simple and basic handbook for effective composition of sentences and of essays. (Sadly, its amplification by Strunk's student E.B. White is still in copyright and not available for free.)
Academic Word List As an aid to enhance academic vocabulary, this site divides the Academic Word List (the most common 808 words in academic texts in English, excluding the most frequent 2000 words in English) into eleven levels.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language. Entries contain detailed etymological analyses that trace word development through time and are illustrated by quotations from a wide range of English-language sources.
Chicago Manual of Style Online Searchable, online version of the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) providing two basic documentation systems, the humanities style (notes and bibliography) and the author-date system for editors and writers.
Purdue Online Writing Lab Writing resources and easily searchable instructions in citation practices (especially MLA format) for research papers as well as other tips on resumé and CV composition.
Fowler, The King's English
A thorough explication of English grammar.

Literary Texts Online

Literature Online Good source for English and American poetry, novels and drama. Can be searched in a variety of ways, including for single words or phrases.
Google Book Search UC has now become part of what may be the largest scan in history. Who knows, maybe you'll be able to read the entire UC collection online before you graduate.
Project Gutenberg This first site with free electronic books now has over 20,000 titles.
Internet Archive: Text Archive Working with an impressive list of participants, including the University of California, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are scanning public domain texts and making them freely available.
Universal Library The Million Books Project is the first part of establishing the Universal Library, which aims to provide free access to all human knowledge. The MBP adheres to current U.S. copyright law so is concentrating on books in the public domain.
Books Online Good database with links to over 25,000 electronic texts. Can search by author, title, subject.
Bartleby Library A "national digital library" of various texts and reference works ranging from Leaves of Grass to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

General Medieval Resources

The Electronic Introduction to Old English By Peter Baker.
The Circolwyrde Wordhord A glossary of terms in Old English.
Modern English to Old English Vocabulary
An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Edited by Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller.
Dictionary of Old English/Old English Corpus A complete record of most surviving Old English (over 3000 texts).
Early English Books Online (EEBO) When finished, this collection will contain images of almost every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
The British Museum A place to search for information and images about objects like coins and clothing used in the Anglo-Saxon period.
“Bede’s World" A resource for exploring the monastic life of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval world.
The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies The best web resources for medievalists; it's the product of an international collaborative project.
The Labyrinth Old English pages An international collaboration on information about the Anglo-Saxon period.
Medieval Sourcebook A collection of links. Specific pages for Anglo-Saxon England.
Middle English Compendium The Middle English Compendium offers easy access to and interconnectivity with three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources, including a large collection of Middle English texts.
International Medieval Bibliography Covers articles, collections of essays on Europe and the Byzantine Empire from 400-1500. Some brief annotations.
Medieval and Renaissance food

Early Modern and Renaissance Literature, Including Shakespeare

ITER: Gateway to the Renaissance A bibliography of articles and reviews drawn from more than a thousand medieval and Renaissance journal titles covering the years 400-1700.
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet A vast collation of resources on Shakespeare, on the Renaissance stage, and on contemporary literature, culture, and history.
Blue Letter Bible Searchable across multiple translations, including the Latin Vulgate.
Shakespeare in Quarto Color images of each page of each of the early 'quarto' printings in which most of the plays were first published. (Quartos were smallish, affordable copies of individual plays. The plays were printed only in this format until 1623, when the Collected Works were first printed as a single, massive book ('the First Folio'). Quartos do not exist for some of the plays in the Folio, however: either they never appeared in this fomat, or all copies of the printing have been lost.)
Elizabethan costume pages What the well-dressed Renaissance man (and woman) is wearing, including information about makeup. Vast resource for hobbyists as well as scholars.
Perseus digital library While no modern (in-copyright) edition of Shakespeare is available online, this is the 1879 edition of the plays. Any citation of Shakespeare you take from an online source should be checked against a post-1960 print edition. Perseus also includes a smattering of works by Shakespeare's contemporaries (notably the complete Marlowe and Holinshed); and if you have Latin or Greek it is much the best resource for original classical texts, as each word links to a dictionary entry.
Renascence editions Pretty reliable versions of a vast range of early texts.
T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine and Less Greeke (1944), still the most comprehensive resource defining the scope and character of the education available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Map of Early Modern London
Shakespeare's Staging
Vast resource on the performance of each of Shakespeare's plays, from his time all the way to ours.
Milton Revealed
Milton beyond the page: performances, illustrations, adaptations, and reinventions of his poetic legacy.

18th-Century Literature

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) When completed, this collection will contain images of almost every work printed in Great Britain or its colonies from 1701-1800.
Scotland’s Culture: Robert Burns
William Blake Archive

19th-Century Literature

Victorian Web Woven by George Landow at Brown, this is an example of what an intelligently done web site can be. Useful for many aspects of Victorian life.
Victorian Database Online Index to scholarship in all fields of nineteenth-century British studies published from 1945-present.
British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception Cardiff University's Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research produced this listing of nearly 2300 works by around 900 authors. Entries include information about format, editions, advertisements, reviews and may be searched or browsed. Quite useful for anyone doing work in this period.
19th Century British Newspapers Contains full runs of 49 papers selected by the British Library as representative. It contains regional and national papers in England as well as papers from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Content comes from penny papers read by the working class and papers advocating political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism and Home Rule.
The Nineteenth-Century Index The most comprehensive and dynamic source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives.
Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture A journal with a wide range of materials that engage with various intertextual and print-cultural aspects of the Romantic period.
British Association for Romantic Studies
The Walter Scott Digital Archive
The Rossetti Archive
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin On-Line
Darwin Correspondence Project The searchable full texts of more than 6,000 of Darwin’s letters and information on 9,000 more.

20th-Century Literature

Gertrude Stein online
James Joyce Portal
Finnegans Web
UbuWeb Modern and contemporary conceptual work.
Silliman’s blog on contemporary poetry and poetics
William Faulkner on the Web
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Post-WWII American Literature and Culture Database

American Literature

Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) The Bibliography of American Literature (9 volumes, Yale University Press, 1955-1991) provides nearly 40,000 records of the literary works of approximately 300 American writers. Coverage includes 1776 to 1930.
Modern American Poetry (MAPS) MAPS is a comprehensive learning environment and scholarly forum for the study of modern American poetry. It is an online journal and multimedia companion to The Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000).
The Academy of American Poets
Al Filreis’s “Modern and Contemporary American Poetry” Site A compendium of resources on 20th century American poetry.
Early American Imprints, Series I (1639 - 1800) Indexes more than 36,000 items consisting of some 2,400,000 images offering insight into every aspect of American life in the 17th and 18th centuries such as agriculture, auctions, foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, and witchcraft. Provides online access to the print and microform counterparts American Bibliography by Charles Evans, and Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography by Roger Bristol. (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) Indexes more than 36,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, state papers and other print genres published from 1801-1819. Covers all aspects of American life including taxation, public health and diseases, slavery, military law, Indians, Christianity, cosmology, etiquette, and much more. Based on the American Bibliography of Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index Comprehensive coverage of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. C19 Index draws on the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.
Making of America (Cornell University) Access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles from 22 journals with 19th century imprints. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Making of America is a collaboration between the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to document American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction by drawing upon the primary materials at these two institutions.
Making of America (University of Michigan) Access to 9,500 books and almost 2500 digitized issues of 12 journals published in the 19th century. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Making of America is a collaboration between the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to document American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction by drawing upon unique primary materials held at each institution.
American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900 Contains digitized images of more than 1,100 periodicals. Includes special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically significant magazines.
Early American Newspapers Access to hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. Based largely on Clarence Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,1690-1820." (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives