Content developed by:
Aparna Zambare, Reference Librarian /
English Bibliographer
Phone: (989) 774-6427
E-mail: aparna.zambare@cmich.edu

Electronic Databases | Reference Sources | Digital Texts

Last Updated: 6/4/09

I have listed some electronic resources, reference books, and digital literary text projects below for the students and aficionados of English literature. This page is under construction, so if you have any suggestions to make it better, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Electronic Databases

• MLA International Bibliography
  Indexes books, articles, and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature, the electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism
  Profiles influential writers via excerpted passages from selected criticism on contemporary authors.
• Humanities Abstracts
  Provides bibliographic citation for journals articles, book reviews, or other items in linguistics, film, folklore, performing arts, world literatures, journalism, and classics.
• Philosopher’s Index
  Indexes books and journals of philosophy and related fields, such as literary theory, literary criticism, language ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics.
• Children's Literature Review
  Provides criticism on the most popular and influential authors of the genre from Louisa May Alcott to Judy Blume.
• Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
  An acquisition, research, and reference service that offers more than 1,400,000 MARC records and more than 300,000 reviews of children's books--all full text searchable from 36 review sources.
• ERIC
  Covers published and unpublished sources on education and includes some full-text documents.
• Early English Books Online
  Contains digital facsimile page images of works printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
• Essay and General Literature Index (EssayGenLit)
  Cites essays and articles in collections of essays and other works published in the United States, Great Britain and Canada.  The areas covered are: folklore, linguistics, children's literature, classical studies, poetry, drama, fiction, women's studies, and film. 
• ArticleFirst
  Includes citations for articles in the humanities and popular culture along with other subjects.

Reference Sources at the CMU Libraries

• Dictionaries and Glossaries
  • The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. REFERENCE: PE 1628 .A623 2000
  • A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. REFERENCE: P152 .T7 1993
  • Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases. REFERENCE: PE2839 .W5 
  • The Facts on File Dictionary of the Theatre. REFERENCE: PN2035 .F27 1988
  • A Glossary of Literary Terms. REFERENCE: PN44.5 .A2 1999p 
  • A Handbook to Literature. REFERENCE: PN41 .H355 2000
  • Oxford English Dictionary. REFERENCE: PE1625 .O87 1989 (Available ONLINE)
  • Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. REFERENCE: PE1625 .R3 1998p 
• Encyclopedias
  • Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature. BOOKS: PN41 .E48 1998
  • The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. REFERENCE: P29 .E48 1994
  • Encyclopedia of the Novel. REFERENCE: PN41 .E53 1998
  • Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. REFERENCE: PN 172 .E52 2001
  • The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. REFERENCE: PN1861 .W67 1994x
• Criticism Reference
  • Masterplots II. Poetry Series. REFERENCE: PN1110.5 .M37 2002
  • Masterplots. REFERENCE: PN44 .M33 1996
  • Nineteenth-century Literature Criticism. REFERENCE: PN761 .N5 
  • Something About the Author. REFERENCE: PN451 .S6 
  • Twentieth-century Literary Criticism. REFERENCE: PN771 .T84x
  • Electronic Book Review
• Indexes
  • Chicorel Theater Index to Plays in Anthologies and Collections, 1970-1976. REFERENCE: Z5781 .C4846
  • Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections: An Author and Title Index to Plays Appearing in Collections Published between 1900 and 1985.  REFERENCE:  Z5781 .O8 1988
  • Play Index. REFERENCE: Z5781 .P53 1992
• Some Online Reference Sources (CMU and the Internet)
  • Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
    Available online through: Virtual Reference Collection at http://www.lib.cmich.edu/departments/reference/#dictionaries (CMU Users only).
  • MLA Formatting and Style Guide ONLINE
    Also available online through: Virtual Reference Collection at http://www.lib.cmich.edu/departments/reference/#style (CMU Users only).  Follow the Using Modern Language Association Format link.
  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
    An illustrated collection of more than 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women from around the world who shaped all aspects of Britain's past. 

Digital Text Centers (Selected scholarly electronic text projects)

• The Academy of American Poets
  Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, a non-profit organization, this site maintains one of the liveliest and most comprehensive poetry sites to foster the appreciation of contemporary American poetry.
• African Writers: Voices of Change 
  Published by the University of Florida,  this site provides information on such eminent African writers as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Alex La Guma, Dambudzo Marechera, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alan Paton, Okot P'Bitek, and Amos Tutuola.
• Brown University Scholarly Technology Group
  The Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG) provides expertise in the critical new technologies that support scholarly work in the digital medium, especially for the humanities.  The group focuses on XML publication tools, text encoding and metadata standards, database design, and accessibility standards.
• Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
  Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities or CETH, a unit of Rutgers University, that maintains a very useful directory of major electronic text centers in the United States as well as a few such centers outside the United States and provides access to their own humanities e-text projects. 
• Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture Links
  This comprehensive site from Missouri Western State College lists sources on major aspects of children’s and young adult literature, including history, genre, folklore and mythology, Children’s book Awards, Children’s Literature journals, Children's Literature Organizations and Centers, censorship, multiculturalism, themes and subjects, and information about authors and illustrators.
• The Cyberspace and Critical Theory Overview 
  This site has been prepared by Professor George P. Landow, Brown University.  It contains 7,000 documents and images on the topics of cyberspace, hypertext, virtual reality, and critical theory. 
• Dickinson Electronic Archives
  Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA) is a website devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, her writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work.
• English Online Resources -- Electronic Text Center 
  This is an excellent resource prepared by Virginia University’s E-Text Center that provides access to the English poetry database, the English verse drama database, English prose drama, early English prose fiction, early American fiction, the American poetry database, and the African American poetry database. 
• Hamlet on the Ramparts
  Hamlet on the Ramparts is designed and maintained by the MIT’s Shakespeare Electronic Archive in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library and other institutions. Their aim is to provide free access to an evolving collection of texts, images, and film relevant to Hamlet, especially his first encounter with the Ghost.  The main site provides restricted access but Hamlet on the Ramparts is open to public access. 
• Humanities Text Initiative
  The Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service, provides online access to full text resources since 1994.  The unit is also responsible for the creation, delivery, and maintenance of electronic texts, as well as a mechanism for furthering the library community’s capabilities in the area of online text.
• Humbul Humanities Hub
  The Humbul Humanities Hub is a service of the Resource Discovery Network funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and is hosted by the University of Oxford.  It aims at providing online access to humanities resources.
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
  Edited by Professor Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism is designed to provide reference resources on major critics, theorists, and philosophers.  This scholarly site requires user name and password to log in. 
• The Oxford Text Archive
  The Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University, hosts AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics. The OTA works closely with members of the Arts and Humanities academic community to collect, catalogue, and preserve high-quality electronic texts for research and teaching.
• Postcolonial Studies
  The Postcolonial Studies website (PS) is a project in progress at the English Department at Emory University.  Its aim is to provide sources on major topics and issues in Postcolonial Studies.
• Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen
  This is a thoroughly hypertexted version of Jane Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. 
• PROJECT GUTENBERG OFFICIAL HOME SITE
  Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of FREE electronic books (eBooks or eTexts).
• Robert Frost
  Part of The Academy of American Poets site, this page is devoted to Robert Frost, one of the greatest American poets.  It includes a short biography of the poet, his selected poems, and links to some external sites.
• Romantic Circles
  Published by the University of Maryland, Romantic Circles, a Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.
• The Toni Morrison Society 
  This is the official site of the Toni Morrison Society.  Hosted by Georgia State University, the purpose of the site is to provide information on the society’s activities which aims to study the life and works of Toni Morrison.
• UNB Electronic Text Centre
  Hosted by the University of New Brunswick, Canada, the Centre prepares and publishes electronic texts and images to standards, including SGML/XML encoded special collection texts such as Canadian Poetry database. 
• VoS Voice of the Shuttle
  Maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara, Voice of the Shuttle is a site which models the way the humanities are organized for research and teaching as well as the way they are adapting to social, cultural, and technological changes.  This is perhaps the most comprehensive database of the humanities resources on the web. 
• The Walt Whitman Archive
  The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.
• The William Blake Archive
  A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sun Microsystems and Inso Corporation.