Literature

Background Information (encyclopedias)
Words (dictionaries, quotations, grammer & style)
Indexes/Databases (journal and news articles)
Book Information (online catalogs, book reviews & more)
Full-text sources, including journals
People (biographies)
Authors' websites
Literary journals affiliated with Ohio University
Department of English Language and Literature
Suggest a purchase/contact the Literature bibliographer

I. Background (encyclopedias)

Britannica Online: Web version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Also includes recent volumes of the Britannica Book of the Year and other supplementary resources. Ohio University/OhioLINK access only.
Columbia Encyclopedia: Online version of a standard one-volume encyclopedia. Ohio University/OhioLINK access only.

II. Words (dictionaries, quotations, grammar & style)

American Heritage Dictionary: Online version of a standard desk dictionary. Ohio University/OhioLINK access only.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Online version of the 1894 edition.
Oxford English Dictionary: Excellent for historical aspects of English words. Includes quotations that show how words were usedat different times. Ohio University/OhioLINK access only.
Bartlett's Quotations: Published in 1901, containes pre-20th Century Quotations
An On-Line English Grammar
Strunk's Elements of Style
Web Extension to American Psychological Association Style (WEAPAS)
MLA Style (Modern Language Association): From the MLA itself

III. Indexes/Databases (journal and news articles)

Please note that some of these databases are available only to Ohio University students, faculty, and staff who use the campus computer network or log in through their campus e-mail accounts or the University's DialNet system.

ABELL: Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature: "Aims to list monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world. " Covers English language and literature, bibliography, and traditional culture of the English-speaking world.
Art Abstracts: Citations with some abstracts from 230 journals. Covers 1984 to date.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index: Citations, with references to other citations from more than 1100 international journals. Covers 1980 to date.
Bibliography of American Literature: A descriptive bibliography containing nearly 40,000 records of the literary works of approximately 300 American writers from the period of the Revolution to 1930. Does not include literary criticism on these authors.
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry: An index to 135,000 poems with over 10,000 of them in full-text. [Ref. Desk CD-ROM; 4th floor Alden Library]
Early English Books, Series II, 1641-1700: Based on Donald Wing's Short -Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America). [Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC): Citations only for works printed in England or its dependencies from the beginning of printing through the end of the 18th century. Covers 1473 to 1800.
Essay & General Literature Index: Citations to book chapters and essays in many fields, emphasis on literary criticism. Covers June 1983 to date.
Humanities Abstracts: Citations only of 300 journals. Covers 1984 to date.
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe: Full-text access to information in a wide range of subject areas.
MLA International Bibliography: Bibliographic information for critical scholarly materials in literature, criticism, drama, language, linguistics, humanities, and folklore. Coverage is worldwide and includes articles chosen from 3,500+ journals, series, monographs, dissertations, bibliographies, and conference proceedings. Covers publications from 1963 to the present. A series of printed volumes in the Index Shelves area of Alden Library's Reference Department covers the years 1921 through 1962.
PCI: Periodical Contents Index: Citations only from more than 2,000 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. Covers 19th century to early 1990s.
Periodical Abstracts: Citations with abstracts from more than 1,600 general interest and scholarly periodicals; some full-text articles (Adobe Acrobat Reader required). Covers 1986 to date.
Victorian Database: Provides information on books, articles and dissertations published from 1970 to 1995 on every field of 19th century British studies.[Ref. Desk CD-ROM; 4th floor Alden Library]
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900: [Ref. Desk CD-ROM; 4th floor Alden Library]
The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM, 1990-1993.: Contains over 12,000 records and annotations of material on Shakespeare in 75 languages. Annual updates promise to extend the time period back to 1900 and continueinto the future. [Ref. Desk CD-ROM; 4th floor Alden Library]

IV. Book Information (online catalogs, book reviews and more)

ALICE: Ohio University's online catalog
OhioLINK Central Catalog: a central catalog of Ohio's 76 college & university libraries' materials
Links to other libraries
Worldcat
Book Review Digest: Citations with full-text excerpts to book reviews of current fiction and non-fiction works from 1983 to the present. Ohio University/OhioLINK access only. Print version of pervious years can be found in the 4th floor Index Shelves (Alden Reference Dept.)

V. Full-text sources, including journals

African- American Poetry Database: Full-text of more than 3,000 poems. Covers 1760-1900.
American Fiction, 1774-1900.: The collection consists of approximately 14,000 titles-- novels, romances, tales, short stories, fictitious biographies, travels and sketches, allegories, and tract-like tales.[Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
American Periodical Series: 18th century through 1850, some beyond. This comprehensive series contains nearly every American periodical title, all subjects. The Library has Series I, 1741-1800 and Series II, 1800-1850+. [Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
American Poetry Database: Full-text of more than 40,000 poems. Covers 17th to early 20th centuries.
ARTFL: Full-text memoirs, pamphlets, and speeches promoting the Treasury of French Language.
Bartleby Online (Great Books Online): Includes a link to BartlebyVerse: American & English Poetry: 1250-1920
The Bible In English: Full-text translations of 21 editions of the Bible. Covers Old English to 20th Century.
Dictionary of the Old English Corpus: "The Corpus contains all surviving OE material, excluding some variant texts...over 3000 different texts."
Early American Imprints First Series, 1639-1800.: Also known as "Evans", this set contains the full-text of non-serial titles listed in the Charles Evans American Bibliography and its supplements, a catalog of books published in America, all subjects.[Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
Early English Books, Series I: 1475-1640 is based on Pollard and Redgrave's A Short-title Catalog Of Books Printed In England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed abroad 1475-1640. [Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
Eighteenth Century Fiction: Full-text of 96 works of prose fiction. Covers 1700 to 1780.
English Literary Periodical Series (ELPS): 1681-1914. A set of 341 significant early journals, magazines, and reviews reflecting British life and culture. [Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
English Literature, Microbook Library: The Library has Part I, other parts werenever completed. This material covers English literature from Beowulf to the beginnings of the Restoration (1660). [Microforms Dept., 1st floor Alden Library]
English Poetry Database: Full-text of 16,000+ poems, written in English by 1,350 poets between 600 and 1900 AD. Covers 7th - 19th centuries.
English Prose Drama: Full-text of more than 1600 British plays written between the mid-16th century and the end of the 19th century. Covers 16th to 19th centuries.
English Verse Drama: Full-text of 2,200+ plays. Covers 13th - 19th centuries.
The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: A full-text source based on the Hugo Award-winning book, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.[Ref. Desk CD-ROM; 4th floor Alden Library]
Literature Resource Center: Full-text biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline.
Luminarium: Full-text of various Medieval, Renaissance, and 17th Century literary works.
Masterplots Complete: Electronic version of the Masterplots series. Search by author, title, keyword, or genre. Includes plot summaries and author biographies and bibliographies. [Alden Library SearchNet computers only]
Oxford English Dictionary: Full-text dictionary. Covers 1992.
Project Gutenberg
Shakespeare, Editions and Adaptations of: Full-text of 11 major editions of Shakespeare's work. Covers 16th to 19th centuries.
Wilson Author Biographies: his fulltext database contains biographies and bibliographies of some 4,300 writers who lived from 800 b.c. to the early 20th century. They reprepresent the literatures of many nations, cultures, and ages: from classical Greece and Rome to Russia, Europe, Scandinavia, Britain and the United States.[Ref. Desk CD-ROM; 4th floor Alden Library]
Women Writers Online: Full-text of writings by women between 1400 and 1850.

VI. People (biographies)

See this list of biographical sources at Alden Library.

VII. Authors' Websites

Jane Austen Information Page: English majors will adore the complete hypertext versions of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Love and Friendship," as well as annotated versions of several others like "The Watsons" (an uncompleted novel) and "Lady Susan". The creators of this site at the Universtiy of Texas have stocked the pond with Austen information, a long biography, maps and more, tossing in even minor works and letters.
Willa Cather Page: Willa Cather is the author of "My Antonia" and other pioneering novels set in Nebraska. What this page does best is use the Web as a palette, incorporating other sites to paint a broad portrait of Cather's life and times: "The southwestern landscape depicted in "Tom Outland's Story" and Death Comes for the Archbishop can be explored (in a tourist fashion) at the Mesa Verde website."
Charles Dickens
Emily Dickinson: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, a 19th century American poet, was born 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. After her death on 15 May 1886 over 1700 poems, which she had bound into booklets, were discovered. The fame of her poetry has spread until now she is acclaimed throughout the world. This page is a repository of links to information about her. We have a section on her life, the e-mail discussion list (emweb), other references to her, and a list of frequently asked questions or "FAQ." This site also has a page of Dickinsonian products & services and a page of related poet and poetry links.
Edith Wharton Society: The Edith Wharton Society offers Wharton scholars and other interested persons an opportunity to share in the study and appreciation of the life and works of this author. Through annual meetings, sessions, special conferences, and its journal, The Edith Wharton Review, the Society provides a forum for Wharton studies.
Ever the Twain Shall Meet: "I haven't heard anything like that since the orphanage burned down," Mark Twain is supposed to have said when asked what he thought of a visit to the opera. The beloved American author is brought back to life among these pages, which mainly offers links to his books.
William Faulkner on the Web: Yoknapatawpha (how's that for a tongue-twister?), the fictional Mississippi county created by Faulkner as the backdrop for much of his writing, is home to the notorious Snopes family, the sartorial Sartorises and, before she died anyway, Addie Bundren. Faulkner fans interested in these characters from the pages of The Unvanquished, The Hamlet and As I Lay Dying can access commentary on these and other works here. Maintained by John Padgett of the University of Mississippi, the page also contains a wealth of Faulkner trivia (including the famous exchange between the writer and actor Clark Gable), a filmography and biogaphical info.
Robert Frost: Three Volumes, &c.;: This subsite of Project Bartleby is a collection of Robert Frost's out-of-copyright poems. Those include volumes such as "A Boy's Will" (1913) and "Mountain Interval" (1916), as well as individual poems, and audio readings. Works are added as they become available (when copyrights run out), and are indexed by title and first line.
A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James and A Biographical Register of Henry James's Correspondents: The lack of hoopla obscures the revolutionary nature of the undertaking, a joint effort between Nebraska's Publishing Technologies Manager, Joe Steinbach, and coauthors Steven H. Jobe and Susan E. Gunter, associate English professors at Hanover College and Westminster College, respectively. "The press is going to be doing a huge project to be putting all of James's [more than 10,000] letters online as well as in printed volumes.
The Franz Kafka Homepage: The Kafka Society of America was founded in 1975 as the first society exclusively devoted to scholarly exchange in the field of international Kafka studies. Meetings of the Kafka Society are held annually each December in conjuction with the Convention of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), with which the Kafka Society is allied. The Journal of the Kafka Society of America, published since 1975, presents papers given at the annual meetings, other articles, essays, bibliographies and materials of interest.
Toni Morrison: An online homage to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Anniina's page indexes a plethora of Toni Morrison sites that link to bibliographies, biographies, and interviews. The site also features information on six of Morrison's novels, with links to articles, reviews, essays, and educational resources related to each book.
The Papa Page: Fan Marcel Mitran has created a virtual biography, with sections on famous episodes in Hemingway's life. A photo album of classic Hemingway he-man images also is included. This handsome site paints a lively portrait of the mucho-macho author; the one thing absent is Hemingway's writing -- not a bad contradiction, since his life often rivaled his art as a work in progress.
Romantic Circles: This website devoted to the study of Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, their contemporaries and historical contexts. Romantic Circles is the collaborative product of editors, contributors, and users around the world--a wide community with a shared interest in the literature and culture of the younger Romantics and their ever-widening circles of influence.
The Collected Works of Shakespeare: The Bard's histories, comedies, tragedies, and poems are ready to read here. Most are presented in plain text, although several favorites like Hamlet have been converted to HTML, making it simple to access famous speeches. Perhaps this site's greatest function is its glossary of Shakespeare-speak.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: More than just the text of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, this site provides timelines, quotes, images and links to other web sites about Jonathan Swift.
Dylan Thomas: This good Web site offers a wonderful tribute to the Welsh poet who drank himself to death at the age 39 in New York, in 1953. You will find a brief biography, a photo of Thomas's simple grave in Laugharne, Wales, and links to electronic texts of Thomas's poems.
What the Thunder Said: T.S. Eliot: What the Thunder Said lets you browse a growing collection of electronic Eliot texts, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to "Portrait of a Lady." You'll also find a bio and links to other Eliot-related sites. But the most delightful feature is the search engine: type in a word and it hunts through a number of texts, pulling up lines featuring your term. Enter "dogs" and you get this snippet from the "Cats" muse: "He sits in the High Street on market day;/The bullocks may bellow, the sheep they may bleat,/But the dogs and the herdsmen will turn them away."
Walt Whitman Home Page: Lost from the Library of Congress for nearly 50 years, the Walt Whitman notebooks are brought back here on the Internet. Because they are so fragile (Whitman carried them around in his shirt pockets during the Civil War), handling by the public is out of the question. The solution, part of the National Digital Library effort by the National Library of Congress, is to provide access to these pages in GIF form. You can see Whitman's loop-like script, read his thoughts on the war, and seek insight into the mind of a poet. All pages of the four notebooks have been scanned--even those left blank and the pages that have been partially ripped out.
Wired for Books: This project of the Ohio University Telecommunications Center features readings of works by classic authors and authors affiliated with the Athens and Ohio University communities.
Thomas Wolfe Web Page: Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), the Bard of North Carolina, is honored at this serviceable if not scintillating Web site. The biography page, presently a highlight of this evolving site, notes that "His opulent language and unique literary style have elevated his life to legendary status through his four autobiographical novels." You'll also find links to related sites such as The Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C. The page's creator, working with the Thomas Wolfe Society, promises such future developments as "A presentation of Wolfe's life through pictures and perhaps a photographic tour of the Wolfe Memorial.
Yahoo's Arts: Humanities: Literature: A large array of full-text choices by genres, authors, books, and many more.

VIII. Literary Journals Affiliated with Ohio University

The Milton Quarterly: The Milton Quarterly (ISSN: 0026-4326) is a scholarly journal about the life and writings of John Milton. MQ appears in March, May, October, and December, and is a non-profit corporation with offices in the English Department of Ohio University. It is endorsed and partially supported by the Milton Society of America. Subscription rates: $18/year for individuals; $28/year for libraries. Back issues are $7.50 each. Complete runs of the journals (1967-present) are available for $450, U.S. postage included. After volume 10, the annual index of MQ appears in the Arts and Humanities Citation Indes published. An index of MQ also appears in the American Humanities Index.; Subscription and Contact Information: The editors are willing to consider any scholarly material of interest to Miltonists. Questions regarding articles, book reviews, and general issues relating to Milton scholarship should be addressed to: Roy Flannagan, Editor, Milton Quarterly, Ellis Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. or e-mail him at: rflanniga1@ohiou.edu.; Subscription, advertising and business-relation questions should be directed to Partick A. Smith, Assistant Editor.
The Ohio Review: The Ohio Review (ISSN: 0360-1013) is a balanced, informed engagement of contemporary American letters, with special emphasis on poetics. It is published triannually with financial support from the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University, Ohio Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.; Subscription Rates: $16 for 3 issues; $40 for 9 issues.; Subscription and Contact Information: Editor, Wayne Dodd, The Ohio Review, Ellis Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701.
Quarter After Eight: Quarter After Eight (ISSN: 1082-3697) is an annual publication of fiction, prose poetry, and related criticism made possible through thefinancial support of the Ohio University Student Activities Commission.; Subscription Rates: $5/year; $6.95 for foreign subscribers, including canada, payable in U.S. funds.; Submissions and Contact Information: The editors of Quarter After Eight accept unsolicied submissions from September 1 through March 1. Any manuscript arriving outside of the submission period will be returned inread. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped anevelope with sufficient postage, or they wull not be returned. Contact the editors of Quarter After Eight at Ellis Hall, Ohio University, Athens Ohio 45701.

IX. Department of English Language and Literature

Department of English Language and Literature
On-Line Advanced Composition (English 308JW)