Voices from the Gaps:
Women Writers of Color. This site includes biographical information and
bibliographies on contemporary writers, but some nineteenth-century subjects
are covered as well.
American Studies Links. Richard Horwitz, Professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa, has compiled this very useful cross-disciplinary list of recommended links in an easy-to-use tabbed format.
General Literature Sites
Victorian Web. George Landow,
one of the foremost authorities on literary hypertext, created this rich
site. See also the many links at the Victoria
Research Web,a site associated
with the VICTORIA discussion list.
Voice of the Shuttle. One of the first
such sites on the Web, Alan Liu's comprehensive site covers literary theory
as well as various periods of literature. The appearance of the site has recently
been updated, and a search feature has been added.
Modern American Poetry. This companion site to Anthology of Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson, includes biographies, links, and excerpts from literary criticism on the poets.
Museum of American Poetics. This
site focuses primarily on modern poetry and includes links to poetry sites
as well as RealVideo presentations by and about contemporary authors.
Literary History. This easy-to-navigate
site maintains a collection of annotated links on 19th-century British and
20th century British and American writers.
$ Literary Encyclopedia. This resource provides the first 600 words of an article for free; users must pay to see the rest. It includes biographical essays written by literature scholars; it also has a feature that permits visitors to create a timeline.
Digital Projects
The Aurora Project is a digital visualization of data showing the mobility of African Americans during Reconstruction and later years
The NINES Project is a peer-reviewed site that uses special software (Collex) to enhance the usability of current literary digitization projects on the web. It also sponsors annual workshops on creating these projects (Application deadline: October 15.)
Books Online
Note: Because of copyright restrictions, only works published prior to 1923
and those made available by the copyright holder are available for free online.
Before you pay to read something published before 1923, such as the e-books
available at Amazon.com, alibris.com and other sites, check these sites for links to the
free versions of the texts. In most cases, the only pre-1923 books offered for
sale are those also offered without charge by Project Gutenberg or other sites.
Google Books. This site has full versions in .pdf format of a lot of out-of-copyright books; it's a great resource. To find the complete version and not the snippet version, use Advanced Search. Note: for-profit print-on-demand publishers have locked up some of these these out-of-copyright books so that Google can't provide a full view. If you can't find them at Google Books, try archive.org or Project Gutenberg.
Archive.org. This site has books as well as sound and film media, including some that are not available at Google Books.
A Celebration of Women Writers. Mary Mark Ockerbloom's comprehensive site includes links to texts, pictures, and bibliographies for American women writers as well as authors from many other countries.
Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
has been putting texts online in plain text or zipped form for several years.
The site includes a searchable index. The
Project Gutenberg site now also has
an RSS feed (for Bloglines or other
rss feed readers) so that you can see what texts have been added.
Project Bartleby Archive. This searchable archive of online texts at Columbia University includes reference books on American literature.
The Open Library project reproduces
the page images of the edition and allows viewers to "turn the pages" just
as they would with a regular book. Among the books included are some by Stephen
Crane, Henry James, James Fenimore Cooper, and
Gertrude Atherton.
Wright American Fiction,
1851-1875.This searchable site features works 1752 texts by 842 authors;
its object is to include every novel published from 1851-1875 in the United
States. Some familiar works are included, but many are rare or otherwise unobtainable
online.
Perseus Project. Although this site's principal focus is ancient and Renaissance literature, the Perseus Project at Tufts University has a significant collection of California and Midwestern online texts.
Modernist Journals Project at Brown University includes .pdf image files of The New Age(1907-1922) and Cine-Tracts (1977-1982). New to the collection: December 1910.
Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Primary Sources
Cornell University's Making
of America site is an extensive, searchable collection of major periodicals
of the nineteenth century. The full collection lists 114 books and 24 periodicals,
including Harper's, The Atlantic, Scribner's, and many
other important journals. Files are now available in several formats: page
images, .pdf (Adobe Acrobat), and uncorrected plain text.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. This new site from the Library of Congress provides a searchable database of page images from selected American newspapers from 1900-1910 and information about other newspapers not online.
The New York Public Library, which has the Schomburg Collection of nineteenth-century African American women writers, has just made a number of other digital collections of images available online; it is especially rich in text and images about New York, maps, the performing arts, and African American history.
The
FictionMags index provides tables of contents for popular periodicals
of the twentieth century such as The Saturday Evening Post; it
is cross-indexed by author and periodical. Although it focuses on genre
fiction (science fiction and mysteries, primarily), it provides useful
information on other types as well.
The Women
Working, 1870-1930 archive (Open Collections Program) at Harvard
University includes "[d]igitized historical, manuscript, and image resources
selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections that explore
women's roles in the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression."
The site provides free, searchable access to
the collection's "2,396 books and pamphlets, 1,075 photographs,
and 5,000 pages from manuscript collections."
Godey's Lady's Book.
Selected issues of an important nineteenth-century periodical; includes illustrations. Note: $ Accessible Archives has the full run of this periodical, but it costs $60 a year for individual subscribers.
Internet Library of Early Journals.This
site at Oxford includes a search feature and online versions of important
British periodicals including Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's
Magazine, Notes and Queries, and Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society.
The
Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland contains
online versions of primary sources such as proclamations, letters from slaves,
court testimony, and other documents from the National Archives as well as
essays on the period 1861-1867.
$ HarpWeek. Although most of this collection
of Harper's Weekly magazines is not available to anyone but institutional
subscribers, it does contain a few free sites, including the following: Immigrant
and Ethnic America, The American West, Black America: 1857-1874, The World
of Thomas Nast, and American Political Prints.
The Library of America is a nonprofit organization devoted to publishing authoritative editions of American authors. Its site includes information not only about its products but also about the authors whose works it publishes.
National Endowment for the Humanities.
This site provides links to and information about what the NEH considers
to be the best literature sites on the web for K-12 educators and students,
including American literature sites.
The Scout
Report.A well-respected weekly online publication from the University
of Wisconsin, the Scout Report selects and reviews sites of interest to researchers.
History Matters. Primarily
designed for teachers of U. S. history, this site at George Mason University
also reviews links to many sites dealing with American cultural history and
has a search feature.
Reference and Map Sites
Silva Rhetoricae.. This
site provides a guide to classical rhetorical terms, including definitions
and examples.
