Guides: Subject Guide: English: Subject Databases

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Databases

Academic Complete
Over 200,000 ebooks from major academic publishers in all subjects.

Oxford scholarship online. Literature
Cross-searchable library containing the full text and abstracts of classic and newly published Oxford University Press books in the area of Literature.
Literature online
The Master index and Further web resources are structured indexes to Lion and Internet resources for English and American literature. Lion includes Chadwyck-Healey fulltext databases: English poetry, English drama (combining English verse drama and English prose drama databases), Early English prose fiction, Editions and adaptations of Shakespeare, The Bible in English, The King James "Authorized" Version, Eighteenth-century fiction, American poetry, and African-American poetry. Lion also includes reference databases: Annual bibliography of English language and literature; Bibliography of American literature; Webster's Third new international dictionary, unabridged; and Periodicals contents index: Literature.
Literary manuscripts
The Berg Collection is recognised as one of the finest literary research collections in the world, and the Victorian holdings are the undisputed jewel in its crown. A broad range of authors from across the nineteenth century make this an essential research tool for all scholars and students researching Victorian literature. Most of these unique manuscripts are unavailable in any medium elsewhere. Supplemented by some rare printed materials, including early editions annotated by the authors. Each author collection is included in its entirety, allowing users to browse and search the manuscripts. Authors include Matthew Arnold, the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, William makepeace Thackeray. Unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings trace the inspiration and genesis behind the period's greatest works. Provides a mass of personal correspondence revealing the close circles and interconnectedness of the Victorians.
Alex catalogue of electronic texts
The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 "classic" public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.
Early English books online
A digitized version of the Early English Books microfilm collection, this database contains full-text page images of of about 100,000 of the 1250,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection. Also includes a growing collection of searchable full text provided by the EEBO Text Creation Partnership. Illustrations in the books may be searched and viewed separately as well as in conjunction with the text.
Early European books
Diverse array of printed sources from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Opens the door to some of the world's most significant collections of early printed books. All works printed in Europe before 1701, regardless of language, fall within the scope of the project, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield. Builds upon and complements Early English Books Online (EEBO) and is largely concerned with non-Anglophone materials; however, books in English or printed in the English-speaking world that are already represented in EEBO are not omitted from Early European Books where they form an integral element of the predominantly non-Anglophone collections that have been made available for digital capture. Full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts.

Oxford scholarship online. Shakespeare
Shakespeare Survey
Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism.

The complete works of William Shakespeare
Contains the complete works of William Shakespeare from the original electronic source of the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare.
British literary manuscripts online, c. 1660-1900
An extensive digital archive, comprising more than 400,000 manuscript pages, includes complete facsimile copies of poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence and other manuscripts from the Restoration through the Victorian era. Sources libraries include the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Library of Scotland, Princeton University, and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Bodleian Library broadside ballads
Catalog and collection of digitized ballads from the 16th through early 20th century. Some ballads that have music notation are accompanied by sound files. Database has multiple searchable fields, including an index of items and themes depicted in illustrations.
Electronic Enlightenment
Searchable and browseable database offering extensive access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. Coverage includes letters and documents, document sources such as manuscripts and early printed editions, scholarly annotations, and links to biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other online resources.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Over 180,000 titles, including books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more, published in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century.

Nineteenth century collections online
A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century; will be comprised of numerous collections to be released over many years, including a variety of material types--monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more--in one cross-searchable location.

Oxford World Classics
Three hundred ebooks from leading 18th and 19th century authors, including the Brontës, Dickens, Trollope and Zola.
Writers and Their Work
The collection embraces the best of modern literary theory and criticism with contributions from world-renowned authors including T. S. Eliot, A.S. Byatt, J.B. Priestley, and Germaine Greer and covers the breadth of the canon with volumes dedicated to writers ranging from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin to Carol Ann Duffy, J. R. R. Tolkien to Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jane Austen to Iris Murdoch.
JISC Library Hub
Combined catalogue of over 200 UK research libraries

MLA bibliography
Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Proved access to citations from worldwide publications, including periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
JSTOR
Provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each title.
Annual bibliography of English language and literature
ABELL contains over 750,000 records covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world on English language, English literature, and bibliographic studies from 1920 onwards.
Web of Science
ISI Web of Science is an integrated platform designed to support research in academic, corporate, government, and not for profit organizations. ISI citation databases are multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information indexed to be searched by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. They can also be searched for articles that cite a known author or work. Cited reference searching allows use of a given work as if it were a subject term, to identify more recent articles on the same topic.
Scopus
A large abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Scopus has journal coverage in many subjects across the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.

Digital Theatre +
A digital streaming video collection of unique films of current, leading British theatre productions, musicals, and operas. Includes behind-the-scenes documentaries as well as teaching and learning resources to facilitate a deeper understanding of the productions and texts.
Drama Online collections
National Theatre Collection 3, Shakespeare's Globe 1 & 2, Nick Hern Books
National Theatre Collection
National Theatre Collection: Volumes I & II bring the stage to life through access to high-definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies. Through a collaboration with the U.K.'s National Theatre, the collections offer a range of digital performance resources never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive.
Royal Shakespeare Company collection
The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection offers high-definition recordings of The Bard’s dramatic canon, featuring the world’s best Shakespearean actors and directors, along with supplemental teaching materials to help students engage more deeply with the material and enhance the overall learning experience.

The London stage database, 1660-1800
The London Stage is a key reference work documenting theatrical performances in eighteenth-century London. This information has been compiled from the playbills, newspapers and theatrical diaries of the period. Within this database, it is now possible to search all the performances of The London Stage between 1660-1800 using the title of the performance, names of performers, date ranges and theatres.

National Theatre Collection
National Theatre Collection: Volumes I & II bring the stage to life through access to high-definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies. Through a collaboration with the U.K.'s National Theatre, the collections offer a range of digital performance resources never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive.
Epistolae: Medieval Women's Letters
Epistolae is a collection of medieval Latin letters to and from women. The letters collected here date from the 4th to the 13th centuries, and they are presented in their original Latin as well as in English translation. The letters are organized by the name and biography of the women writers or recipients. Biographical sketches of the women, descriptions of the subject matter of the letters, and the historical context of the correspondence are included where available.
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
Journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages.
Adam Matthew Explorer
Digitised primary material including medieval, early modern and modern British sources, US collections, South Africa and India, missionary records and material for China and Japan.

Gale primary sources
Provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) and our newspaper archives also accessed via Gale Newsvault.

Proquest archive collections
African Diaspora, 1860-present; Black Drama Third Edition; Black Thought and Culture; ProQuest History Vault: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century; Border and Migration Studies Online; Environmental Issues Online; LGBT Thought and Culture; LGBT Magazine Archive 1954-2015; Human Rights Studies Online; Anthropological Fieldwork Online; Social Work Online; British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries; North American Women's Letters and Diaries; Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820; Gerritsen Collection Women's History; Women's Magazine Archive 1846-2015; American Periodicals Series 1740-1940; British Periodicals Collection; C19: the 19th Century Index; Periodicals Archive Online Collections; Art & Architecture Archive 1895-2005; Country Life Archive 1897-2005; Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive; Early European Books Collections; Performance Design Archive Online; Music Online: Classical Scores Library; Music Online: Music Periodicals of the 19th Century; Royal Shakespeare Company Collection; Luther's Werke; Religious Magazine Archive 1845-2015; Twentieth Century Religious Thought; ProQuest Congressional Digital Collection 1789-2010; Colonial State Papers 1574-1757; Documents on British Policy Overseas 1898-1980; Trench Journals and Unit Magazines 1914-1919; Digital National Security Archive; Revolution and Protest Online; Security Issues Online; Jerusalem Post; Korea Times; Chinese Newspaper Collection 1832-1953; Leftist Newspapers 1845-2015; News Policy & Politics Magazine Archive; Selected US newspaper archives

Eighteenth century drama
"Eighteenth Century Drama features the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library - a unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Explore the Larpent plays, papers of prominent theatrical figures of the period, including correspondence, financial documents, and portraits. Cross-reference this with essential searchable databases created from information in The London Stage 1729-1800 and A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800"--Nature and scope.
Treasures in full. Caxton's Chaucer
"On this site you will find William Caxton's two editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, probably printed in 1476 and 1483. The originals are both in the British Library. In the Background section you can find information on Caxton's life and about how he became involved with printing. You can find links to some web resources on Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales in our Links section and further reading in References. You can also view a Timeline". (Home page)

Accessible Archives
This is a major collection of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century US sources covering African American newspapers, anti-slavery and women’s suffrage campaigns, documents on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, America in World War One, and American county histories.
Wiley Digital Archives
Journal archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Royal College of Physicians and Royal Geographical Society