English Language & Literature

Resources for conducting literary research on English & American Literatures.

Romantic Period - quick starts

Reference Shelf

Romanticism: Keywords
ISBN: 9780470659830
Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature
ISBN: 9781405188104
Handbook of British Romanticism
ISBN: 9783110376364
A Handbook of Romanticism Studies
ISBN: 9781444334968
Historical Dictionary of Romanticism in Literature
ISBN: 9780810878853
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era 1760-1850
ISBN: 157958361X
Europe, 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire
ISBN: 9780684313597
Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, British Culture, 1776-1832
ISBN: 9780199245437
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing
ISBN: 9783030119454

Histories

Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
ISBN: 9780521790079
The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 2, Gothic in the Nineteenth Century
ISBN: 9781108472715
Cambridge History of British Theatre, 1660 to 1895
ISBN: 0521650682
Cambridge History of English Poetry
ISBN: 9780521883061
Cambridge History of the English Novel
ISBN: 0521194954
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Romanticism
ISBN: 9780521300100
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1695–1830
ISBN: 9780521810173

Primary Source Discovery Databases

These databases attempt to bring together all of their respective primary source collections into one databases for greater discoverability.

Gale Primary Sources
Gale Primary Sources (formerly Artemis) cross searches all Gale digital archives. These primary source collections provide pages of newspapers, books, manuscripts, maps, and photographs.
AM Explorer
AMExplorer allows users to search across multiple Adam Matthew collections that include millions of pages of social sciences and humanities primary sources spanning the 15th – 21st centuries.
ProQuest One Literature
ProQuest One Literature provides content and tools to support the study of literature from a variety of sources including diverse primary texts, criticism, full-text journals, book reviews, dissertations, eBooks, reference material, audio, and video.

Major Nineteenth Century Index

C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
Contains citations to millions of books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives published between 1790 and 1919. It is probably the most comprehensive source for English language material printed in the 19th Century.

Newspapers & Periodicals

19th Century British Pamphlets
19th Century British Pamphlets offers online access to the most significant British pamphlets held in UK research libraries. The pamphlets are organized into collections and focus on the political, economic and social issues of the time.
British Library Newspapers (1732-1950)
Contains digitized images of historic newspapers, newsbooks, ephemera and national & regional papers from the British Isles. Searches Nineteenth Century British Library Newspapers and Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Burney Collection Newspapers simultaneously.
British Periodicals Online
Contains full-text articles published in British periodicals during 1680s-1930s. Includes magisterial quarterlies and scholarly & professional organs, as well as coterie art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.
Eighteenth Century Journals Portal
Contains rare newspapers and journals printed between 1685 and 1835, illuminating all aspects of the long eighteenth-century social, political and literary life.

Internet Library of Early Journals
Contains digitized images of six 18th and 19th century journals: Annual Register, Notes and Queries, Gentleman's Magazine, The Builder, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

London Times (1785-2019) [via Gale Times Digital Archive]
Includes digitized images of every page of the (London) Times.
Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals
Access guaranteed through May 2027
19th Century UK Periodicals offers content related to nineteenth-century literature and culture, empire, feminism, the history of the book, the creative and performing arts, sport and leisure, science and medicine, and the professions.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Contains digitized images of the pages of mainstream American, British, Irish, and Scottish newspapers and other periodicals, including The New York Times (1851-2007), The Guardian & Observer (1791-2003), The Irish Times (1859-2010), The Scotsman (1817-1950), American Periodical Series Online (1730s-1930s) and more.
Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, 1802-1907
Contains subject and author indexes to nearly 500 British and American periodicals published between 1802 and 1907.

Manuscripts & Ephemera

British Literary Manuscripts Online
Contains facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance through the Restoration and Victorian era.

Broadside Ballads Online Database
Contains broadside ballads from Oxford's Bodleian Library collections, ranging in date from 16th to 19th centuries, indexed by title, first line, and subjects of text and illustration.

Defining Gender, 1450-1910
Contains digitized images of rare print and manuscript texts on many aspects of gender, sexuality and culture in Great Britain from 1450-1910.
Empire Online
Contains maps, manuscripts, pamphlets, paintings, drawings and rare books devoted to colonial history, politics, culture and society.
English Drama (1280-1915)
Contains dramatic works published in the British Isles from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. Includes Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, as well as Medieval morality plays, mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas.
English Poetry (600-1900)
Contains poems published in the British Isles from the eighth century to the early twentieth century. Includes canonical and lesser known poets, including women poets.
English Poetry, 2nd Edition
Contains poems published by poets in the British Isles and the British Empire, including Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries.
Gerritsen Collection - Women's History Online, 1543-1945
Contains materials focused on the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others.
Global Commodities
Contains manuscript materials, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, ephemera, objects and rare books on the study of global commodities in world history. Users can explore the origins of the commodity -- coffee & tea, spices, silver & gold, opium, cotton, etc. -- their first uses, the trade that developed and the ways in which these items were marketed and consumed.
John Johnson Collection
Access guaranteed through May 2027
John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera offers insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Categories include Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising.
London Low Life
London Low Life is a full-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London.

NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online
"Devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first."

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO)
Contains primary sources from the Long 19th century, including works in Western as well as non-Western languages, sourced from rare collections at libraries and other institutions around the globe.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Contains works of prose fiction by over 100 British and Irish authors from 1782-1903. Includes popular romances, sensation fiction, Colonial adventure novels and children’s literature.
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape
Contains a vast collection of working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers anywhere in the world, all digitized in full color.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
Contains poems from over 40 Scottish poets, plus extensive bio-critical essays, as well as selected criticism.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007
Contains documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world.
U.K. Parliamentary Papers
Contains digitized images of the parliamentary papers produced between 1801-1900.
Women Writers Online
Contains works written by English and American women between 1400-1850. Includes verse, fiction, and drama, as well as autobiographies, domestic manuals, and critical commentaries on select works and authors.