Research Guides: English and American Literature: Digital Collections (NYU subscription)

Digital Collections (NYU subscription)

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.
Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window
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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
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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.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online contains full texts and full-length filmed performances of plays ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, with supplementary material including first night program texts, critical analyses, and images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos. Includes the Core Collection, Critical Studies and Performance Practice, Nick Hern Books Modern Plays, National Theatre Collection, RSC Live Collection, and Aurora Metro Books, among others.
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.
Literary Manuscripts Berg This link opens in a new window
Literary Manuscripts Berg contains facsimile images of nineteenth-century literary manuscripts from the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. Authors represented in this collection include Emily Bronte, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Alfred Tennyson. This collection also includes some printed materials, including early editions annotated by the authors.
Literary Manuscripts Leeds This link opens in a new window
Literary Manuscripts Leeds contains complete facsimile images of manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with a database of first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for poems within the collection. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and color images demonstrating 17th and 18th century English handwriting.
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)
London Low Life This link opens in a new window
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.In addition to the digital documents, London Low Life contains a wealth of secondary resources, including a chronology, interactive maps, essays, online galleries and links to other useful websites.
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries brings together the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Manuscripts in this collection can be browsed and read as high-resolution page images.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (Gale) This link opens in a new window
Nineteenth Century Collections Online is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally. ** The database includes the collections Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics & Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture; Children's Literature and Childhood; Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature; Photography: The World Through the Lens; Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform; Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Parts I and II; And Women: Transnational Networks. **
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.
Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape This link opens in a new window
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape provides access to digitized images of manuscripts, artworks, and correspondence from the Wordsworth Trust, focusing on William Wordsworth and his circle. This collection also includes the writings of Dorothy Wordsworth and manuscripts from Romantic writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey.
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.
Twayne's Author Series This link opens in a new window
Twayne’s Authors Series offers in-depth introductions to the lives and works of writers, the history and influence of literary movements, and the development of literary genres. The online version of Twayne's Authors Series includes content from six print series, including U.S. Authors, English Writers, and World Authors.
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.
Victorian Popular Culture This link opens in a new window
Victorian Popular Culture is an essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The resource is divided into four self-contained sections: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic.
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.

HathiTrust Digital Library

HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
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.

Database Search Tips

Here are some tips for better search results in databases.

This usage works on most databases, but check 'Help' sections for supported search syntax.

Boolean: (using operators: and, or, not)

mother AND father searches for occurrences of both words within scope defined.
mother OR father searches for one or all, but both are not required.
mother NOT father searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father.’
(mother NOT father) AND god searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father,’ then also requires the word ‘god.’

Truncation:

art* (asterisk as truncation character) searches for art, arts, artistic, artful, etc.

Wildcard:

m?n (question mark as wildcard character) searches for man and men.