Research Guides: Comparative Literature: Digital Collections

Digital Collections (access through NYU Libraries)

These online collections include primary sources (some with searchable text, some with page images), bibliographic information, biographical information, cultural and historical contexts for literature, and more. Access is limited to NYU community members.

17th & 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers This link opens in a new window
17th & 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers contains the digitized materials (not just newspapers) collected by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) and held in the British Library. A useful source for find information about the United Kingdom and the wider world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.The database's advanced search offers searching publications by title, place, language, section, and date. The Publications Search link includes searching by format, including (among others) books, broadsides, forms, newspapers, and pamphlets.
American Periodicals Series Online This link opens in a new window
Search a selection of periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Bibliographie der Deutschen Sprach und Literaturwissenschaft (BDSL) This link opens in a new window
An international Bibliography of German Literature and Literary Studies. Established as a special bibliography of the University Library Frankfurt am Main the "Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft" (BDSL) has been published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag since 1957 and comprises world-wide coverage of published literature on the German language, literature and general Germanic studies.
Black Short Fiction and Folklore (African, African American, and Diaspora) This link opens in a new window
Collection of stories from Africa and the African Diaspora. When complete, it will offer more than 8,000 short stories and folktales, ranging thematically from oral traditions that date back many hundreds of years to contemporary tales of modern life. In addition to these works, the database includes complete runs of selected literary magazines, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon.
Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, the Schomburg Studies, and much more. It combines several resources for research and teaching in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), historical black newspapers, and the Black Literature Index.
Black Women Writers (African, African American, and Diaspora) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to fiction, poetry, and essays from three continents and 20 countries, representing voices of women from Africa and the African diaspora. Currently features over 50,000 pages of poetry and prose
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Includes 10,000 pages of diaries and letters revealing the experiences of approximately 500 women. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
British Periodicals provides access to page images and searchable full text of periodicals from the British Isles, published from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth.
C19: The 19th Century Index This link opens in a new window
C19: The 19th Century Index provides bibliographic coverage of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives from the English-speaking world. This database includes the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1824-1900), Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, Palmer's Index to The Times, the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, and more.
Caribbean History and Culture, 1535-1920 This link opens in a new window
Caribbean History and Culture, 1535-1920 provides access to searchable digitized copies of books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera pertaining to the Caribbean islands, from the 16th to the early 20th century, in English, French, Spanish, and other European languages. Materials in this resource have been assembled from the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Caribbean Literature This link opens in a new window
Caribbean Literature is a searchable collection primarily of poetry and fiction, with a selection of non-fiction works, produced in the Caribbean islands or by authors from that region during the 19th and 20th centuries. It includes numerous hard-to-find works in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and regional creoles, as well as a set of reference works for Caribbean creole languages.
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new window
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry contains citations for poems that appear in anthologies and collections, as well as poet biographies, commentaries, a glossary of poetic terms, and full text for some poems. Users can search poems by title, first line, author gender, genre, and more.
Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition includes all of Eliot's collected essays, reviews, lectures, commentaries from The Criterion, and letters to editors. Other highlights include essays from his student years at Smith Academy and Harvard and his graduate work at Harvard and Oxford, including his doctoral dissertation; unsigned, unidentified essays published in the New Statesman and the Monist; essays and reviews published in the Egoist, Athenaeum, TLS, Dial, Art and Letters; his Clark and Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry, Norton Lectures, Page-Barbour Lectures, Boutwood Lectures; unpublished essays, lectures, addresses from various archives; and transcripts of broadcasts, speeches, endorsements, and memorial tributes.
Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans, 1639-1800 This link opens in a new window
Search or browse the books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans.
Early American Imprints, Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 This link opens in a new window
Search or browse the books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the distinguished bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. 1801-1819
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Searchable full text is also available for a subset of the collection.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Eighteenth Century Collections Online provides access to facsimile page images and full text of works published in the British Isles (plus some from North America) during the 18th century. The collection includes books, pamphlets, and broadsides. Users can search within texts keyword and download them as PDFs.
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period This link opens in a new window
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period includes searchable full text and page images for volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842. The collection also offers numerous biographical and critical essays prepared by leading scholars
Latin American Women Writers This link opens in a new window
Latin American Women Writers is a searchable collection of prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. It also includes essays by Latin American feminists that address the concerns of women broadly as well as the distinctive issues pertaining to women's struggles in the region.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Latino Literature is a searchable collection of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino writers working in the United States, including previously unpublished titles. The database also includes a collection of ephemera (playbills, brochures, photographs, postcards, etc.) and artwork.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author.
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Contains contemporaneous letters, diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present This link opens in a new window
Orlando provides information on women writers (primarily British) from the Middle Ages to the present. Entries include biographical information, contextual material, timelines, links to other writers in the database, and bibliographies. Users can explore networks of influence and allusion among writers, or create their own chronologies of literary history.
Past Masters This link opens in a new window
Provides primary source full-text electronic editions of selected texts from the humanities, including works by philosophers and political economists.
Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers,1500-1700 This link opens in a new window
Perdita Manuscripts is a digitized manuscript collection produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. Users can browse page images of manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period This link opens in a new window
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period contains searchable full text of Romantic-era poetry composed by Scottish women, as well as contemporary critical reviews and numerous scholarly essays on the poets and their work.
South and Southeast Asian Literature: Classic and Postcolional Writers in English This link opens in a new window
A searchable collection of fiction and poetry written in English by authors from South and Southeast Asia and their diasporas.
Torrossa: Casalini Full Text Platform This link opens in a new window
Torrossa provides full-text access to research in the humanities, fine arts, social sciences, pure sciences, applied sciences, and law from a substantial list of major Italian publishers. Coverage includes monographs (eBooks), periodicals and conference proceedings. Some publications are in languages other than Italian. The extensive collection can be browsed by discipline (Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification).
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels This link opens in a new window
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels contains digitized images of comic books and graphic novels from the 1960’s to the works of modern sequential artists. The collection also contains materials about comics, including interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from The Comics Journal and other secondary sources.
Women Writers Online This link opens in a new window
Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible.

Digital Collections (public, open access)

These online collections include primary source materials, cultural and historical contexts for literature, and more. These resources are available on the open web, and do not require an NYU login.

Digital Library of the Caribbean
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. Bibliographic and full text search are available for all volumes in HathiTrust. Public domain volumes are freely accessible to the public and can be downloaded in their entirety with authentication by persons affiliated with partner institutions. NYU Libraries is a HathiTrust partner institution.
International Children's Digital Library
The ICDL is a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world. It supports communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Modernist Journals Project
The MJP is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published.

Ebook Central

Can't make it to the library? Ebook Central to the rescue! Ebook Central contains more than 40,000 full-text books in a variety of subject areas. You will have the ability to search, highlight, annotate books on Ebook Central as well as print or download portions of the texts.

Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
Ebook Central is NYU's preferred ebook provider. Users can search, read, highlight, and annotate full-text books in many subject areas, including the social sciences and humanities.

Cambridge Companions

Cambridge Companions Online offers subject or theme based collections of content within a richly functional, fully cross-searchable online environment. All of the fabulous resources of the numerous Cambridge Companions are available to you through this resource. The Companions feature authors and theorists including: Shakespeare, Nabokov, Hemingway, Adorno, Benjamin, Marlowe, just to name a few. You can view individual volumes, individual essays, and the rich bibliographies that are included within each publication. Each collection is updated with new Companions on publication.

Cambridge Companions Online This link opens in a new window