Literature On the Web

A Resource list for English Literature students.

One of the assignments I had this month for my collection development course in library science grad school was to compile a list of Internet resources for students. I chose to look for literature websites, databases, and sites, since that is one of my chief interests. I wanted to share what I found here on the blog, since I was really quite amazed at the wealth. Thinking back to when I was an English major in the early 80s, I just can not believe what a difference there is in what is easily available today. It's just phenomenal!

E-book collections: (Quoted text comes directly from the linked websites)

Alex Catalog of Electronic Texts: "This is a collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature as well as Western philosophy."

Digital Book Index: "This index is intended as a "Meta-index" for most major eBook sites, along with thousands of smaller specialized sites."

Electronic Texts on the Internet: This is an extensive list from RefDesk.com of many full text literature sites on the Internet. It includes links to many of the other sites I have referenced here. From Beowulf to Kafka, the Constitution to Project Muse, Elements of Style, Library of Congress and World Lecture Hall.

International Children's Digital Library: Wide variety of full text & illustrated children's books to be read/listened to online. New supporters & contributors are welcome.

Internet Public Library: "A wide variety of free, full-text sources for literature on the web."

Million Books Project: Collection of scanned texts, Not extensive. Browse by subject.

The Online Books Page: "Listing over 35,000 free books on the Web - Updated Friday, June 19, 2009 "

Project Gutenberg: "There are nearly 30,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. A grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources."

Internet sites & search engines:

Bartleby.com: Great books, authors, literary encyclopedias online.

Columbia University Press: Database of full text poetry, e-books, gazetteer of the world, and other electronically published resources.

Gale's Literary Index " a master index to the major literature products published by Gale. It combines and cross-references over 165,000 author names, including pseudonyms and variant names, and listings for over 215,000 titles into one source."

Google Books: Search engine for full text and citations of thousands of books and magazines, in co-operation with authors, publishers & libraries.

Google Scholar: "provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations."

Kidlitosphere Central: "strives to provide a passage to the wonderful variety of resources available from the society of bloggers in children's and young adult literature."

LibraryThing: catalog your books, read reviews of books, find author profiles, & make literary connections. "World's largest book club."

New York Times book reviews online.

Poets.org: website of the American Academy of Poets. Poem, biographies, literary essays.

Poetry Foundation: "The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture."

Scholar's Guide to the WWW: extensive list of helpful links on every scholarly subject.

WWW Virtual Library: Index to Open Access (free) sites for encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, biographies and other reference works.

Yahoo Directory for Literature: Links to all things literature, bookish, author-related, social networking and publishing on the web.