Research Guides: English Literature/Criticism: Primary Texts/ Reference Sources

Digital Collections (Literary Texts)

Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window
Digitized facsimiles of all printed materials published in Great Britain between 1473 and 1700, and materials published elsewhere in the world in English during the same period. Includes searchable text from the Text Creation Project, Phase I.
Materials include books, tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, ballads, rhymes, and other ephemera. The database continues to develop, with over 100,000 records currently included and increasing capabilities for direct keyword searching of the texts.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
If searches in this database retrieve incorrect results, clear cache/cookies to resolve the problem.
18th century English-language publications in the humanities, arts, and sciences.
Digitized copies of significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO includes a variety of materials from books and directories, Bibles, sheet music, sermons, advertisements, and other works by both well-known and lesser-known men and women writers.

Digital Collections (Primary Sources/Contextual Materials)

19th Century British Pamphlets This link opens in a new window
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. The digitization of more than 26,000 pamphlets from collections in seven universities in the UK spanning more than one million pages brings together a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.
ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
Database of archival collection descriptions, including historical documents, personal papers, and family histories around the world.

dLOC: The Digital Library of the Caribbean
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. The dLOC partner institutions are the core of dLOC. dLOC partners retain all rights to their materials and provide access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

Eight centuries This link opens in a new window
Eight Centuries is a database covering source material dating from 1106 until 1960, aggregating indexes, catalogs, collections, and other finding aids. It provides access to articles, newspapers, books, U.S. patents, government documents, and images, with links to full-text where available.
Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Spanning five centuries, and charting the rise and fall of empires around the world, Empire Online enables students and researchers to explore colonial history, politics, culture and society. With primary source material from American, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, German and British perspectives, Empire Online provides varying points-of-view for comparative research. Documents from Africa, India and North America are also featured.
London Low Life This link opens in a new window
An extraordinary digital collection bringing to life the teeming streets of Victorian London, and inviting students and scholars to explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of the nineteenth century’s greatest city. From salacious ‘swell’s guides’ to scandalous broadsides and subversive posters, the material sold and exchanged on London’s bustling thoroughfares offers an unparalleled insight into the dark underworld of the city. Children’s chapbooks, street cries, slang dictionaries and ballads were all part of a vibrant culture of street literature.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present This link opens in a new window
Provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window
National record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. Concise, up-to-date biographies written by named, specialist authors.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney newspapers collection This link opens in a new window
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The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection represents the largest single collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century English news media available from the British Library and includes more than 1,000 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period. This collection helps researchers chart the development of the newspaper as we now know it, beginning with irregularly published transcriptions of Parliamentary debates and proclamations to coffee house newsbooks, finally arriving at newspaper in its current form.
The Burney Newspapers are predominantly London newspapers of the 17th and 18th centuries. The titles range in date from 1603 to the early 1800s.

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Jeff Staiger

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Subjects: Art, Art History and Architecture History, Arts and Administration, Biographies, Cinema Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, Folklore, Historic Preservation, Literature/ Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Romance Languages, Theater Arts