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RESEARCH HELP > HUMANITIES AND AREA STUDIES > BRITISH LITERARY STUDIES

British and Commonwealth Literary Studies

Electronic Primary Resources: Renaissance and Seventeenth Century

• Chadwyck-Healey Individual Literature Collections
  Lists the individual literature collections available from Chadwyck-Healey. Many of these collections are also listed separately on this page. These collections are cross-searchable via Literature Online (LION).
• Columbia Granger's World of Poetry
  The definitive source for locating poems in anthologies. The online version contains a series of key Columbia poetry titles, such as The Classic Hundred Poems, The Top 500 Poems, and The Columbia Granger's® Index to Poetry in Anthologies.
• William Congreve
  A searchable database for The Double Dealer, Love for Love, The Old Bachelor, and The Way of the World.
• Defining Gender
  Examines constructions of femininity and masculinity through “five centuries of advice literature.” Contains over 60,000 documents from the medieval period through the nineteenth century divided into five thematic sections: Conduct & Politeness; Domesticity & the Family; Consumption & Leisure; Education & Sensibility; The Body (available Summer 2007). Additionally, each section features concise, scholarly essays that link to referenced source material.
• Early English Books Online (EEBO)
  From the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War, EEBO digitally reproduces facsimile images of the original editions of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661). Searching is limited to author, title, subject, printer and publication date.
• Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership
  Of the 125,000 titles in EEBO, 25,000 volumes have been targeted for conversion over a five year period to full-text searching. Selection is based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, which was chosen as a guideline because it includes foundational works as well as less canonical titles related to a wide variety of fields, not just literary studies.
• Early English Prose Fiction
  Over 200 complete works in fictional prose from the period 1500-1700. Authors in this collection include Aphra Behn, John Bunyan, Margaret Cavendish, William Congreve, Thomas Heywood, John Lyly, Christopher Middleton, Thomas Nashe, Sir Philip Sidney, John Skelton and Lady Mary Wroth.
• English Drama
  A unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
• English Poetry
  This database of the complete English poetic canon from Anglo-Saxon times to the end of the nineteenth century is drawn from the works of more than 1,250 poets from 600 to 1900. English Poetry contains the full text of over 165,000 poems taken from 4,500 printed sources. The bibliographic basis of English Poetry is the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; works in English of Welsh, Scottish and Irish poets are also included.
• English Poetry, Second Edition
  Redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection with enhanced functionality and the addition of more than 20,000 poems. The most comprehensive archive of English verse available now offers incomparable representation both of the literary heritages of former colonial countries and of the poetic legacies of English writers who have only been brought back to scholarly attention during the last thirty years.
• English Prose Drama
  The database comprises 1653 plays written in English and either acted on or intended for the stage, which are either wholly or predominantly in prose by 356 named and 42 anonymous authors. In addition to plays, English Prose Drama also covers masques, entertainments, and certain closet dramas. It includes both original works, as well as adaptations and translations.
• ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue)
  Includes bibliographical records for all types of material published in Great Britain or its colonies or in English anywhere in the world from 1475 to 1800. ESTC is still in progress. Currently it is about 70% complete for 1475-1640 and 50% for 1641-1700; the 18th-century segment will be ongoing for a number of years.
• The Gerritsen Collection
  A cross-cultural resource for information on women's history. The database spans more than four centuries and 15 languages and includes over two million pages in full image. Users can trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of that country's feminist movement on other countries and their movements.
• LitFinder
  Contains over 135,000 full-text poems, stories, plays, essays, and speeches
• Christopher Marlowe
  A searchable database for Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Hero and Leander, and The Poems of Christopher Marlowe.
• John Milton
  A searchable database for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
• Oxford Shakespeare
  A searchable database of the Oxford edition of the works of William Shakespeare.
• Past Masters Series
  A collection of full-text humanities resources. Titles most relevant to British literary studies can be found under the categories English Letters and Women Writers. Titles in one or both of these categories include the letters of Bentham, Locke, Swift, Pope, Burney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens, Hobbes, Tennyson, Hardy, Synge, Yeats, Baillie, Piozzi, Walpole, Defoe, and Burns. Every word in each title is indexed, and search results retrieve every paragraph containing the search term. You can search more than one title in a category using the power search feature, but you cannot search more than one category at a time.
• Shakespeare, Editions and Adaptations (1591-1911)
  Contains eleven major editions from the First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, twenty-eight separate contemporary printings of individual plays and poems, selected apocrypha and related works. In addition it contains more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the whole of Bell's Acting Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1774).
• Shakespearean Promptbooks
  A searchable database of studies of the annotated stage texts used in various seventeenth-century performances of William Shakespeare's plays. The collection provides an opportunity to examine Shakespearean performance traditions and innovations.
• Internet Shakespeare Editions
  A searchable database containing facsimiles and full-text editions of Shakespeare's plays and poetry; also includes performance materials, such as images of stage designs, as well as a section on Shakespeare's life and times and links to other online resources.
• Women Writers Online
  A full-text, searchable database of works by women writers, including letters, speeches, plays, poetry and novels from 1400 to 1850. Includes Renaissance Women Online, a collection of 100 Renaissance texts, accompanied by contextual and topical essays.

Last modified: April 1, 2009