English Literature: Resources for Graduate Research

Professor Stephen Railton, with assistance from the Scholars’ Lab, created the Faulkner at Virginia archive. Here you can listen in on William Faulkner’s sessions with audiences at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, during his two terms as UVA’s first Writer-in-Residence.

A project of the University of California and California Digital Library, the Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

A project of Hofstra University, the Melville Electronic Library is committed to making reliable texts of all versions of Melville’s works available to all readers in an interactive and collaborative environment.

The Walt Whitman Archive endeavors to make Whitman's vast work freely and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the world, the Whitman Archive is the most comprehensive record of works by and about Whitman—and continues to grow. The Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa), with ongoing contributions from many other editor-scholars, students, information professionals, and technologists.

Who Speaks for the Negro? is a digital archive of materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. The archive consists of digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees as well as print materials related to the project. All of the print materials appear on the website in two versions: an image of the original document which is not searchable and a re-transcribed document which is searchable. These interviews were conducted with leading figures in both literature and the Civil Rights movement, including James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarie Collins Harvey, Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison, and many, many others.

A product of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, & Culture at Texas A&M University, 18th Century Connect is a search portal (access via plain-text searching to open access and proprietary and digital archives including EEBO and ECCO, even if their institutions are unable to afford those resources;) a peer-reviewing organization, and an online community.

A project of Duke University Press, The Carlyle Letters Online is a digital archive based on the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Browse thousands of their collected letters by date, by recipient, by subject, and by volume. We invite you to experience a correspondence that features some of the most influential writers and thinkers of the day.

University of Buckingham: Complete online edition of Dickens's weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. In their day, these were phenomenally popular journals, which not only carried installments of such well known novels as Great Expectations, Hard Times, North and South, and The Woman in White, but also poetry, investigative journalism, travel writing, popular science, history, and political comment. Readers have access to high-quality facsimile downloads of each weekly number, which show a fully searchable transcript of the text of each page.

A project of the Mary Russell Mitford Society, Digital Mitford has two main purposes: to produce the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the works and letters of Mary Russell Mitford; and to share knowledge of TEI XML and other related humanities computing practices with all serious scholars interested in contributing to the project.

From Grinnell College, this is a student-faculty collaboration that created a digital, fully searchable, annotated, translated edition of Beowulf.

Thomas H. Luxon, General Editor, Dartmouth College: The John Milton Reading Room: the complete poetry and selected prose of John Milton, with introductions, research guides, and hyperlinked annotations.

University of Glasgow: The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. This allows us the opportunity to track metaphorical ways of thinking and expressing ourselves over more than a millennium.

The Middle English Texts Series is a long-running academic publishing project based out of the University of Rochester’s Robbins Library. The goal of this project is to make relatively unknown or unread medieval texts available to scholars, teachers, and students who may otherwise struggle to find them in the commercial market. These digital editions, which are free for anyone to view and print, embody this ideal of making ‘fringe’ medieval literature accessible to as many people as possible.

University of California, Berkeley: Milton Revealed is a collaborative project to collect audio-visual materials related to John Milton and his work, to re-examine his relation to theatricality, and to develop teaching approaches to Milton that use performance across a variety of media.

Authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia, The Mind is a Metaphor is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century.

Martin Grandjean, Université de Lausanne: Narration, even fictional, contains a network of interacting characters. Constituting a well defined corpus, the eleven Shakespearean tragedies can easily be compared: We propose here a network visualization in which each character is represented by a node connected with the characters that appear in the same scenes.

Princeton University: The Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA) is an incomplete, yet full-text searchable database of thousands of digitized prosodic works published between 1569 and 1923. The PPA began as a collection of texts about versification. Now it covers the study of poetry, grammar, literary history, and speech. We understand the PPA collections to be necessarily incomplete – a starting point for new scholarship in historical poetics and historical linguistics. As such, we intend the words “prosody” and “archive” in their broadest possible senses.

Developed as part of the NINES project (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), the Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator. This resource provides students and scholars with access to all of DGR's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials. All documents are encoded for structured search and analysis.

University of California, Berkeley: "Shakespeare's Staging explores the history of Shakespeare performance through images, videos, essays and bibliographies. The site is designed to be a resource for teachers and students of Shakespeare as well as for performers and directors of the plays."

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts.

The William Blake Archive is a contemporary response to the needs of this dispersed and various audience of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections where Blake's original works are currently held. Advanced principles of design allow the Blake Archive to integrate editions, catalogues, databases, and scholarly tools into one electronic archival resource. We supply reproductions that are more accurate in color, detail, and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition has provided. The Archive site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Rochester.

From Stockton University, the Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project is an ongoing digital research project that explores different theoretical arenas within postcolonial studies. The Project is an effort to document recent trends in the history of postcolonial studies across a variety of fields and disciplines.