| Electronic Literature Collections Help and Documentation |
The literature collections are electronic books of American and English literature – poetry, drama, fiction, and the Bible. Each collection contains the online full text of one or more books originally published in print. For example, American Poetry 1600-1900 is a collection of 1200 books of poetry, containing more than 40,000 works from over 200 poets.
Search: You can search for works by an author or for all occurrences of a particular word or phrase within one or more collections.
Browse: Displays the list of books within a collection, by author or title. Click to select an individual work.
More Literature: To search two or more collections simultaneously, click More Literature and choose the group you want. Some groups are predefined, e.g. Poetry. To configure your own group, choose All Collections, then select the collections you want.
The literature collections are:
African-American Poetry 1760-1900: Almost 3000 poems written by African-American poets in the late18th and 19th centuries. The poets are among those in the William French et al. bibliography, including Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
American Drama: American dramatic literature from 1714 to the present. It contains more than 2,000 plays written by over 300 American dramatists.
American Poetry 1600-1900: A collection of 1200 books and anthologies of early American poetry, containing more than 40,000 works from over 200 poets. This database contains the works of all major American poets.
An eminent editorial advisory board selected the authors and editions for inclusion in American Poetry. It used as its principal bibliographic source, the Bibliography of American Literature, Yale University Press, 1955-1991, and supplemented this with additional poets to provide a more thorough and rounded collection.
The Bible in English: 21 different versions of the English Bible, including 12 full Bibles, five New Testament texts, two versions of the Gospels only, and William Tyndale's translations of the Pentateuch, Jonah, and the New Testament.
Early American Fiction: 440 novels and short stories of 80 American writers, 1774-1850. Early American Fiction includes the full texts of the first editions of American novels and short stories written before 1850 by authors of significance during their lifetimes. Well-known works by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper are included alongside many works by lesser-known writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick.
Two standard bibliographies, Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction 1774-1850, have been used to define the project. In total, 440 titles in 583 volumes by 80 authors make up the database.
Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare: Eleven major editions of Shakespeare's works, from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-66. It also includes 24 separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha and related works, and more than 100 adaptations, sequels, and burlesques from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Eighteenth Century Fiction: 96 works of English prose fiction from the period 1700-1780, by writers from the British Isles. All of the most widely-studied texts are in the database, alongside others long neglected or unavailable. First editions have been used unless considered unreliable.
English Poetry 600-1900: The most comprehensive archive of English verse from the 7th century to the 20th; more than 175,000 poems by over 1,400 poets from British Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries.
English Prose Drama (1280-1915): More than 1,600 plays written or intended for the stage and wholly or primarily in prose, by over 350 authors from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century.
The bibliographic basis is the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, CUP 1969-72 (NCBEL). The database includes the works of all writers of prose drama listed in NCBEL and principally active before 1900. Editions chosen are usually contemporary with their authors. The entire text of each drama is included with any accompanying text written by the author and forming an integral part of the work.
English Verse Drama (1280-1915): More than 2,200 works of poetry intended for the stage, by over 500 named authors and over 300 anonymous works, from the Shrewsbury Fragments of the late 13th century, through the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, to the end of the 19th century. The entire text of each verse drama is included, together with any accompanying text written by the original author.
The bibliographic basis for English Verse Drama is the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, CUP 1969-72 (NCBEL). The database includes the works of all writers of verse drama listed in NCBEL and principally active before 1900. Editions chosen are usually contemporary with their authors.
20th Century African-American Poetry: 12,000 poems by more than 100 African-American poets, with biographical profiles .
20th Century American Poetry: Collected works and individual volumes of poetry covering the works of most major 20th-century American poets. Over 52,000 works from more than 316 poets. The broad coverage of Twentieth-Century American Poetry includes collected works and individual volumes of poetry from all the major movements and schools, including the New School, the Chicago School, the Southern School, the Confessionals, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets.
20th Century English Poetry: Over 44,000 poems by 288 poets. Incorporating the Modern Poetry Collection and The Faber Poetry Library, Twentieth-Century English Poetry features many canonical poets as well as those from diverse international backgrounds. The complete text of each poem is included, and any integral images are also scanned. Introductions and prefaces to the volumes are included, as are all notes and any prose sections.
William Butler Yeats Collection: The complete work of William Buter Yeats, bringing together 22 printed volumes and including critical and fictional prose, poetry, plays, and autobiographical works.
The Literature Collections are available to Ohio residents as part of the Ohio Web Library. The electronic versions of these literary works were created by ProQuest / Chadwyck-Healey.
December 2005