Languages & Literature

Please explore these databases for tull-text articles and other information about subjects related to language and literature.

• Academic Search Complete (EBSCO): This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for nearly 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,600 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over 100 journals and searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 titles. The database is updated on a daily basis.
• African Writers Series: For over 40 years, this series has published key texts of modern African literature. It has a unique importance in the history of postcolonial writing. It includes 250 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose, including works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Steve Biko, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Dambudzo Marechera, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p'Bitek, and Tayeb Salih.
• African-American Poetry: The early history of African-American poetry from the first recorded poem by an African-American in 1746 to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
• Alexander Street Press Databases: Alexander Street Press houses millions of pages, audio tracks, videos, images, and playlists in literature; music; women's history; Black history; psychological counseling and therapy; social and cultural history; drama, medical, theater, film, and the performing arts; religion; sociology; and other emerging areas.
• American Poetry: Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the colonial period to the early 20th century.
• Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature: The database contains 880,000 records, covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onward.
• Asian American Drama: Asian American Drama brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information, so providing a comprehensive overview of this growing field. The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and it is planned to include contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga.
• Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Bartleby): This site contains over 11,000 searchable quotations and was the first new edition of John Bartlett's corpos to be published after his death in 1905.
• Black Drama: Includes the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. More than a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
• Black Short Fiction and Folklore: This Alexander Street Press resource includes black short fiction and folklore from Africa. The most comprehensive collection yet created of stories from Africa and the African Diaspora. When complete, it will offer more than 8,000 short stories and folktales, ranging thematically from oral traditions that date back many hundreds of years to contemporary tales of modern life. In addition to these works, the database includes complete runs of selected literary magazines, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon. Includes more than 11,707 short stories and more than 82,000 pages.
• Black Women Writers: A celebration of the many voices of women from Africa and the African Diaspora. Offering fiction, poetry, and essays from three continents and 20 countries, the database showcases black women's struggles through time. New content is uploaded on a biweekly basis, giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of extraordinary writings.The database currently features over 14,000 pages of poetry and prose.
• Book Review Digest Plus: This digest provides excerpts from and citations to reviews of current adult and juvenile fiction and non-fiction. Over 7,000 English-language books are covered by the database each year. Concise, critical evaluations are chosen from 109 leading American, British and Canadian periodicals in the humanities, social and general sciences, as well as library review media. Covering a wide range of review media and offering an enormous variety of reviews -- all carefully excerpted to convey the diversity of critical opinion on a title -- Book Review Digest is the most convenient way for patrons to obtain information on prominent new books. This database covers the time period from 1983 to present.
• Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982: This database provides excerpts from, and citations to, reviews of adult and juvenile fiction and non-fiction. Citations with excerpts of reviews of juvenile and adult fiction and nonfiction in the English language are included. Virtually every book has at least one substantial review excerpt, and most have at least two.  Reviews of the following types of books are excluded: government publications, textbooks, and technical books in the sciences and law. However, books on science for the general reader are included. The reviews originate in a group of selected periodicals in the humanities, social sciences, and general science published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
• Caribbean Literature:Caribbean Literature is a searchable collection of poetry and fiction produced in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the titles selected by our editors are numerous rare and hard-to-find works written in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages. New content is uploaded on a biweekly basis, giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of classic, rare, and contemporary literature.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online: Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online provides more than 16,000 biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres. Comprised of the award-winning Dictionary of Literary Biography series, which over its 30-year history has been dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, DLB Complete Online includes the DLB main series, the DLB Documentary Series, and the DLB Yearbook Series - all delivered in an easy-to-use 24/7 online format that matches the exact look and feel of the print originals.
• Early American Fiction: 1789-1875 (Chadwyck-Healey): Early American Fiction 1789-1875 offers the full text of more than 700 first editions of American novels and short stories by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, as well as a host of minor writers of the period.
• Early English Books Online (Chadwyck-Healey): Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - 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.
• Early English Prose Fiction (Chadwyck-Healey)A collection of more than 200 works from the period 1500-1700, exploring the rich diversity of prose fiction in English in the period preceding the emergence of the realist novel as its dominant form.  Early English Prose Fiction offers the full text of works by key writers such as John Bunyan, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe and Aphra Behn.
• Editions and Adaptions of Shakespeare (Chadwyck-Healey): Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare 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).
• Eighteenth Century Fiction: A collection of 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700-1780 by writers from the British Isles. Key figures covered include Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. In addition to a scanned version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the collection also contains two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
• 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: English Poetry contains essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets are drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.
• JSTOR: This is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines in the humanities and sciences.
• Latino Literature: Latino Literature is the most comprehensive collection of Latino Literature yet created. When complete it will include 100,000 pages of fiction and poetry and 450 plays, so representing the Chicano culture and all the different ethnicities of Latin American writers with a Hispanic background working in the United States.
• Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (Proquest): This database abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Documents indexed include journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
• Literature Criticism Online (Gale): Gale takes literature, history and culture to the next level with the largest, most extensive compilation of literary commentary available: Literature Criticism Online. Imagine centuries of analysis - the scholarly and popular commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, encyclopedias, books and periodicals - delivered in an easy-to-use 24/7 online format that matches the exact look and feel of the print originals. The net result is tens of thousands of hard-to-find essays at your fingertips. It's all designed to raise the level of research while providing the around-the-clock remote access that today's researchers demand.
• MagillONLiterature Plus (EBSCO): MagillOnLiterature Plus, produced by Salem Press, is the premier literary database, combining MagillOnLiterature and MagillOnAuthors. This database includes all the literary works, reviewed critical analyses and brief plot summaries that are included in MagillOnLiterature, as well as all the biographies and author essays included in MagillOnAuthors.
• MLA International Bibliography:  Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the MLA International Bibliography is the definitive index for the study of language, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film, covering scholarly publications from the early 20th century to the present. International in scope, it includes citations to journal articles, books, articles in books, series, translations, scholarly editions, websites, and dissertations, with links to full text in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other resources. The database also includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Thesaurus, a proprietary, searchable collection of thousands of subject terms, and personal names used in indexing the bibliography.
• North American Women's Drama: When complete North American Women's Drama will bring together more than 1,500 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information. The collection begins with the works of Mercy Otis Warren and Susanna Haswell Rowson in colonial times and will span the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. It is planned to include contemporary playwrights, such as Tina Howe, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Maria Irene Fornes, Megan Terry, and Paula Vogel.
• Oxford English Dictionary: Traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources.
• Project Muse:  Project MUSE is a trusted provider of authoritative humanities and social science books and journals from more than 200 of the world’s most distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. 
• Twentieth-Century American Poetry (  Chadwyck-Healey):This unparalleled collection includes 50,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Andrei Codrescu, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Cathy Song.
• Victorian Women Writers Project: The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century.