Primary Source Research
For graduate students in English, primary sources can be defined as original works of literature as well as contemporary accounts of that literature, letters written by authors, newspaper accounts of their publication, and much more.
The resources on this page include online access to a wide array of primary sources, including pamphlets and ephemera, which can help researchers to gain a better understanding of the time and place in which a work of literature was created.
Primary Sources in Print
In addition to the literature itself, the library's collection includes a significant number of primary sources such as letters, diaries, and much more. Use JumboSearch to locate these print materials in the library's collection. Below is a sample of the kind of material you can find.
Find Primary Texts in Print
Are you looking for a primary text in English, such as a novel, poem, short story, or play? Use the JumboSearch box to locate print resources in the library. You can also find digitized primary texts in library databases and on the web on this page.
Primary Texts in Library Databases & Research Guides
The resources in this section include a wide variety of primary sources such as original novels, poems, plays, short stories, and much more.
- Early English Books OnlineOver 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), comprising all known English language books from the beginning of printing to 1700.
- Early American imprints. Series I, Evans (1639-1800)An online collection reproducing every extant book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America from 1639 to 1819 - the complete printed, non-serial source materials of American culture for the 17th and 18th centuries.
- Early American imprints. Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819Books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the distinguished bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker
- Eighteenth Century Collections OnlineA comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which has aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera. Subject categories include history and geography; fine arts and social sciences; medicine, science, and technology; literature and language; religion and philosophy; law; general reference. Also included are significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth century, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare. Where they add scholarly value or contain important differences, multiple editions of each individual work are offered.
- European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey CollectionThis collection contains over 2 million printed pages of English-language works, many of them comprising multiple volumes, and constitutes one of the most important collections of British Romantic-era writing in existence anywhere.
- Nineteenth Century British Fiction OnlineCreated by Jennifer Ferguson, Team Lead for Arts & Humanities at Tisch Library, this resource includes links to digitized versions of important works by key authors during the Long Nineteenth Century. Along with the current canonical works, the resource includes additional titles by each author as well as bibliographies, contextual information, and much more.
- 19th century British pamphlets collection via JSTORDigital primary source collection of more than 20,000 pamphlets digitized from research universities in the United Kingdom. A wide range of topics are covered, focusing on political and economic life in 19th century Britain. While the bulk of the collection is from the 19th century, there are some pamphlets included going back to 1545.
- Play IndexPlay Index provides citations to over 30,000 plays written or translated into English, from Antiquity to the present, published in collections since 1949: one-act plays, pageants, plays in verse, radio and television plays, and classic drama. It includes links to the full text of plays if available on the web.
- The Rise of Gothic Fiction in England & the United StatesCreated by Jennifer Ferguson, Team Lead for Arts & Humanities at Tisch Library, this resource includes links to digitized versions of important works of Gothic Fiction published in England and the United States from the Eighteenth to Early-Twentieth Centuries. The resource includes each author's most important contributions to the Gothic as well as bibliographies, contextual information, and much more.
- Short Story IndexIndex to short stories from a variety of magazines. Indexing from 1915-present; select full-text from 1994. Entries feature links to other works by the author and other stories in the source collection.
- Short Story Index RetrospectiveContains more than 140,000 short stories from some 350 periodicals and collections of short stories, and cites short stories published over 150 years.
- Twentieth-Century American PoetryProvides full-text access to approximately 50,000 poems by over 300 American poets. Search by author, keyword, title, first line, dates, publisher, gender, or literary movement.
- Twentieth Century North American DramaFull texts of 1,900 plays from the United States and Canada, of which 1,250 are in copyright and licensed from the authors or their estates.
- Women Writers OnlineA full-text collection of works written by women, in English or in English translation, before 1850.
- Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational ArchiveDigital primary source collection made up of four parts, Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition; Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World; Part III: Institution of Slavery; Part IV: Age of Emancipation. Includes digitized books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, private papers, and letters touching on all aspects of historical slavery.
- Gale Primary SourcesGale Primary Sources combines a number of primary source collections in the humanities and social sciences to allow for research across several centuries and millions of pages of newspapers, books, manuscripts, maps, and photographs.
Primary Texts on the Web
- HathiTrust Digital LibraryHathiTrust is a large-scale collaborative repository with over 10 million volumes including content digitized via the Google Books project, Internet Archive, and by local libraries. Public domain content is full-text; non-public domain content (post-1923) is for full-text searching only. Since Tufts is a member, those with a Tufts login can download the pdf of pre-1923 materials and can build a personal collection. To login select Collections, then select login from the upper right; choose Tufts University and login using your Tufts username and password.
- Shakespeare's Globe ArchiveShakespeare's Globe holds archival material relating to all of the plays produced at the Globe since 1996 and other records documenting the origins and development of the project to build the present Globe on Bankside. This catalogue contains overall descriptions of each of these collections, as well as more detailed file-level records where these exist.
- Parker Library on the WebCorpus Christi College and the Stanford University Libraries welcome you to Parker Library on the Web, a digital exhibit designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Parker Library is a treasure trove of rare medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, as well as early printed books. Almost all manuscripts in the Parker Library collection have been fully digitised and are available in this exhibit, along with associated bibliographic references and annotations made by scholars from around the world.
- African American Women Writers of the 19th CenturyDigital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-Century black women writers. This collection provides access to the thought, perspectives, and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.
- British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832The British Women Romantic Poets Project is a digital initiative of the UC Davis General Library.
- Discovering LiteratureDiscovering Literature brings to life the social, political and cultural context in which key works of literature were written. Enjoy digitised treasures from the British Library's collection, newly commissioned articles, short documentary films, and teacher's notes. Includes thousands of key titles, along with contextual information, representing periods from the Medieval to the 20th Century.
- Evans Early American Imprint CollectionThis project transcribes and encodes the page images of books from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints. This work, and the resulting text files, are jointly funded and owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide. Ultimately, all of the TCP’s work will be placed into the public domain for anyone to use. The texts can be searched through web interfaces provided by the libraries at the University of Michigan and University of Oxford.
- Representative Poetry OnlineHosted by the University of Toronto Libraries, Representative Poetry Online is a web anthology of 4,800 poems in English and French by over 700 poets spanning 1400 years.
- Internet ArchiveInternet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and much more.
- Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg offers over 36,000 free ebook versions of titles in the public domain to download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.
- Westminster Detective LibraryIt is the mission of the Westminster Detective Library to catalog and make available online all the short fiction dealing with detectives and detection published in the United States before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891).
- Reading Europe: European Culture through the bookThe "Reading Europe: European culture through the book" exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view some of the hidden literary gems from the national libraries of Europe. Twenty-three countries have selected nearly a thousand works for the public to peruse. Visitors can discover everything from 18th century English bestsellers to the lost interiors of Russian palaces, all presented in an innovative and multilingual form.
- LibriVoxLibriVox audiobooks are free for anyone to listen to on their computers, iPods or other mobile device, or to burn onto a CD. Titles on LibriVox are in the public domain and include a wide array of classic literature.