Literature & Drama Websites

From The University of Scranton Research Guides

Literature

• a.k.a. Author pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legalized names, pen names, noms des plumes, maiden names, etc.

• Athenaeum Projects The Athenaeum, a weekly periodical from London between 1828-1923, covered a wide range of topics in literature, fine arts, music, politics and popular science. This is an electronic archive for the journal. The Weinberg Memorial Library also has this journal on microfilm.

• Bartleby.com: Great Books Online Electronic text library includes the full-text to hundreds of works.

• Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Provides a variety of information on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his works.

• ClassicReader This collection has over 740 books and 1000 short stories by over 200 authors.

• Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum CSL is a gateway to classical texts and translations ranging from antiquity to neo-Latinists active in the 18th century- and it aspires to include reference works and other secondary resources such as commentaries, articles, and images.

• Digital Dante Project Maintained by the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University, this site contains information on everything relating to Dante.

• Digital Defoe An online, interactive, peer-reviewed journal by the Defoe Society.

• The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection Manuscripts, books annotated by Poe, and portraits of the author, all available digitally.

• Humbul Humanities Hub Striving to "meet the needs of scholars in the humanities," this site is essentially a portal to web sites on American Studies, the Classics, and the literature and languages of English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian and Slavonic.

• Librivox Extensive collection of free audio books read by volunteers; the goal is to record every book in the public domain.

• Literary Resources on the Net Maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers.

• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet Attempts "to be a complete annotated guide to the scholarly Shakespeare resources available on the Internet."

• Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP): Resources for Research: Periodicals This website is a compilation of links to free digital collections of a large variety of American periodicals.

• The National Book Foundation Great American writers and writings. The many other offerings of the foundation include award lists, workshops, writing camps, and other available resources.

• The Web Concordances Concordances to the works of Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, Blake, Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

• The Paris Review: Interview Archive Archive of interviews published in The Paris Review. Interviewees include many famous writers and artists.

• Representative Poetry Online Online resource for poetry from all eras, from the poems themselves to timelines, glossaries of literary terms, and other useful information for the study of poetry.

• Open Source Shakespeare This website "attempts to be the best free Web site containing Shakespeare's complete works" (from the website).

• Geoffrey Chaucer "This site provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program, the English Department, and the Division of Continuing Education. [...] It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages" (from the website). A valuable resource for studies in Chaucer, particularly The Canterbury Tales.

• Victorian Research Web Maintained by Patrick Leary, this website provides guidance and links to reliable web resources for Victorian studies.

• The Poetry Archive "The Poetry Archive is the world's premier collection of recordings of poets reading their own works" (from the website).

• Baldwin Library of Children's Literature Digital Collection An impressive digital archive of works of children's literature published in the UK and US from the early 1700s through the current year. May be searched (full-text or by title/author/etc.) or browsed by genre.

• Walt Whitman Archive This site contains multitudes (to paraphrase Whitman): a searchable database of all editions of Leaves of Grass published during Whitman's lifetime; a growing database of poetry manuscripts; an excellent biography by Folsom and Price, with hyperlinks to an electronic ediotion of Walt Whiteman: An Encyclopedia, ed. by J.R. Lemaster and Donald Kummings (1998); a large collection of contemporary reviews; a comprehensive annnotated bibliography of scholarship on Whitman from 1975 to present; and teaching materials.

• Dante Dartmouth Project This searchable, full-text resource (DDP) combines modern technology with some 700 years of commentary about Dante's Divine Comedy. Hollander (Princeton) includes more than 70 commentaries, beginning with that of Jacopa Alighieri (1322) and ending with Nicholas Fosca (2006), along with complete text of the Divine Comedy, in Italian, as edited by Giorgio Petrocchi and published by Mondadori (Milan 1966-67).

• The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection - This Poe collection includes the private collections of William H. Koester and of J.H. Witty, famed Poe scholar and collector. The site offers all of the images of the HRC's Poe Collection, some with transcriptions provided by the Poe Society. Also included are archival materials, including two volumes written and annotated by Poe. The collection includes first editions of all of Poe's books except one, and letters from historic literary figures (e.g., Longfellow, Lowell, Baudelaire, Whitman, Swinburne, Kipling, and Greeley.

Drama/Theatre

• eOneill An electronic Eugene O'Neill archive. Includes guides to finding resources through major O'Neill archives, selected texts of plays, career information, and other items of interest.

• Internet Broadway Database (IBDB) The IBDB archive is the official database for Broadway theatre information.

• Musicals101 A cyber encyclopedia of musical theatre, TV and film featuring a history of musicals, how musicals are made, photo galleries, chronologies, and more.

• The Plays of William Shakespeare Texts of all of Shakespeare's plays.

• WWW Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama Resources from more than 50 countries on a variety of topics dealing with theatre and drama.

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia "Explore music, theater, and dance at the Library of Congress" (from the website).

• The Costumer's Manifesto Website providing links to resources about costuming, including history, ethnic garb, and many other subsets of information about costumes.

• Internet Shakespeare Editions "The aim of the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to inspire a love of Shakespeare's works in a world-wide audience. To do so, we create and publish works for the student, scholar, actor, and general reader in a form native to the medium of the Internet: scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays, multimedia explorations of the context of Shakespeare's life and works, and records of his plays in performance" (from the "About" section of the website).

• Motley Collection of Theatre & Costume Design Visually stunning and extrmeley user friendly, this site supplies visitors with high-quality scans of renderings and sketches produced by the Motley Group (Margaret Harris, her sister Sophia Harris, and Elizabeth Montgomery) from 1932 to 1976. One can easily search the vast collection of more than 5,000 items from the home page, where one also finds a basic history of the Motley Group and ever-changing examples of various renderings the collection includes.

• Art of Ancient Greek Theater The site includes three different, vitally important features: an images section (picturing the exhibited items), an interactive map, and papyrus fragment (pictured and spoken).

Back to English & Theatre.