English Language and Literature
Cross-disciplinary Research
Sometimes literary research goes beyond the realm of literature! For example, the research topic, Social Constraints on Women Writers in Nineteenth Century England, might require research in the disciplines of literature, sociology, and history. Some of the general databases on this page may be of help. Or, you may need to investigate databases specific to a subject area, which you can find here.
English Research - Other Databases
The film version of many classic novels for viewing, access with your UCID username and password.
The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
Theatrical productions of several Shakespearean plays, access with your UCID username and password.
- Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowMulti-disciplinary, full-text database, with more than 5,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 4,600 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,500 journals and a total of more than 10,000 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.Academic Search Complete provides a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 4,600 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,500 journals and a total of more than 10,000 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
- AustLit This link opens in a new windowAustLit indexes Australian literary content from a range of print and electronic information sources. It also makes available selected critical articles and creative writing in full text. Whenever possible, AustLit provides access to freely available Internet publications. Coverage spans 1780 to the present day.
- Bob Gibson Collection This link opens in a new windowA selection of compilations from the Bob Gibson collection held in Special Collections. They contain short fiction stories published in popular periodicals from the 19th century.
- Canadian business & current affairs database This link opens in a new windowComprises CBCA Business, CBCA Current Events, CBCA Education, and CBCA Reference. Subject coverage is comprehensive. Areas covered include: current events, business, education, science and medicine, arts, law, academia, and lifestyles, all with a Canadian focus.Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database combines full text and indexed content from all four subsets (Business, Current Events, Education, and Reference). Content comes from a broad range of Canadian sources and includes millions of full-text articles and records from 1933 to current, providing an ideal research environment for those interested in Canadian current events, business, science and technology, medical, humanities and the arts, and hundreds of topics.
- Canadian Reference Centre This link opens in a new windowCanadian Reference Centre combines Canadian magazines, newspapers, newswires, and reference books to create the largest collection of regional full text content available to Canadian libraries. This database includes leading Canadian periodicals and international (U.S. and U.K.) periodicals in full text; full text reference books; over 87,900 full text biographies and an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps, and flags.
- Canadiana Online This link opens in a new windowCanadiana online is a full-text searchable database that includes books, journals and government publications documenting Canadian History. The e-book collection, spans three and a half centuries of Canadian documentary history, holds rich primary materials exploring a wide range of subjects and disciplines. Topics range from major historical events to the development of institutions, laws, and science; from Canadian literature to philosophical treatises; from agriculture to politics, trade, and tariffs. The Serials collection includes a wide range of daily and weekly newspapers, specialized journals, and mass-market magazines, as well as city directories and annual reports from churches, schools, and corporations. Specialized publications include trade or industry journals as well as many men’s, women’s, student’s and children’s popular magazines. Early periodicals are an invaluable source of information for researchers in all fields, as they offer a remarkable record of thought and opinion on diverse issues. Lavishly-illustrated journals open a captivating window onto early Canadian society and culture through their articles, advertisements, cartoons, drawings, and photographs. The Government Publications collection includes over 1.7 million pages of historical pre-1920 colonial, provincial and federal government documents. This collection includes government acts, bills, committee reports, court rules, debates, journals, ordinances, a selection of official publications from France and Great Britain, sessional papers, regulations, royal commission reports, voter’s lists, and treaties.
- Defining Gender This link opens in a new windowDefining Gender explores the study and analysis of gender, leisure and consumer culture; one of the most vibrant areas of social, cultural and intellectual research, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. This exciting collection of original primary source material from British archives will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology, education and cultural studies from a gendered perspective. The broad range of thematically organised documents from selected libraries provides an excellent opportunity for comparative study and research. Manuscripts, printed works and illustrations combine to address the key issues from both masculine and feminine perspectives. They are indexed to provide ready accessibility for students across all five sections.
- Early English Books Online This link opens in a new windowIf you cannot find a full text title in EEBO, try EEBO Text Creation PartnershipEarly English Books Online (EEBO) features page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700. Over 200 libraries worldwide have contributed to EEBO. From the first book printed in English through to the ages of Spenser, Shakespeare and of the English Civil War, EEBO's content draws on authoritative and respected short-title catalogues of the period and features a substantial number of text transcriptions specially created for the product. EEBO draws from four authoritative bibliographical resources – both Pollard & Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) in their revised versions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) and the Early English Books Tract Supplement – to present more than 146,000 titles and over 17 million scanned pages of content. Transcribed texts – TCP I and TCP II – are now included on EEBO, adding transcriptions to approximately 50% of the texts featured. EEBO also covers texts in more than 30 languages, ranging from Algonquin to Welsh, and incorporates variant editions and multiple copies. These collections were part of the original UMI Microfilms Collections Project.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which has aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera. Subject categories include history and geography; fine arts and social sciences; medicine, science, and technology; literature and language; religion and philosophy; law; general reference. Also included are significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth century, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare. Where they add scholarly value or contain important differences, multiple editions of each individual work are offered.
- Gale OneFile. CPI.Q (Canadian periodicals) This link opens in a new window1998 - present. Canadian and international periodicals, with emphasis on mainstream and academic titles. Some fulltext.Gale OneFile: CPI.Q, the award-winning electronic version of the Canadian Periodical Index, provides the most-requested Canadian reference information available. It includes more than 1,300 Canadian periodicals (more than 700 full text), a multilingual interface, indexing from 1980 forward, and full-text articles from 1983 forward. This vast collection is fully integrated, enabling users to search the entire database with a single query. It yields a variety of relevant periodical articles, biographies, company profiles, historical documents, science and technology essays, and much more. Exclusive features, including Topic Finder, InterLink, and a mobile-optimized interface, support and enhance the search experience.
- Gale Academic OneFile This link opens in a new windowPeer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources. Contains extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects.Gale’s premier periodical resource, Gale Academic OneFile, provides millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources—including thousands of podcasts and transcripts from NPR and CNN as well as videos from BBC Worldwide Learning. With extensive coverage in key subject areas such as, biology, chemistry, criminal justice, economics, environmental science, history, marketing, political science, and psychology, researchers are able to find accurate information and articles in both PDF and HTML formats with ease.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowArticles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. NOTE: Use library's link to Google Scholar for free access to many search results.A subset of Google that only indexes academic journals. Pros: searching is very easy - just like for regular Google. Covers journals in many disciplines. Cons: Limited functionality for filtering results. May include some journals of dubious quality.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
- Access to subscribed content and open access eBooks
JSTOR is a shared digital library which includes over 2,300 academic journals (dating back to the first volume ever published), along with thousands of monographs and other materials relevant for education. JSTOR also includes articles in the public domain, including Early Journal Content (U.S. content published before 1923 and non-U.S. content published prior to 1870). - ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new windowIndexes and provides selected full text of doctoral dissertations and master's theses worldwide.Searchable and browsable database of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day. It also offers full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997. It contains a significant amount of new international dissertations and theses both in citations and in full text. Designated as an official offsite repository for the U.S. Library of Congress, PQDT Global offers comprehensive historic and ongoing coverage for North American works and significant and growing international coverage from a multiyear program of expanding partnerships with international universities and national associations.
- Empire Online This link opens in a new windowOver 70,000 images of original documents relating to Empire Studies. The images are sourced from libraries and archives around the world, including a strong core of document images from the British Library. Five thematic sections selected around the key topics of Empire courses: Cultural Contacts; Literature; The Visual Empire, Exhibitions; Religion; Race, Class, Colonialism and Imperialism.
- Gale Literature Criticism This link opens in a new windowSearchable database of literary criticism collections representing a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. Literature Criticism Online is comprised of the following 10 Gale series: Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC), Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC), Shakespeare Criticism (SC), Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (LC), Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism (CMLC), Poetry Criticism (PC), Short Story Criticism (SSC), Drama Criticism (DC) and Children's Literature Review (CLR).
- Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new windowGale Literature Resource Center offers the broadest and most representative range of authors and their works, including a deep collection of full-text critical and literary analysis for literary studies. The resource provides researchers with unbounding literary resources to support their literary responses, literary analysis, and thesis statements through a diversity of scholars and critics that ensure all views and interpretations are represented. Researchers can find up-to-date analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world. Gale Literature Resource Center brings together materials that support interdisciplinary approaches, information literacy, and the development of critical thinking skills. Researchers with a literature, history, arts, gender studies, or cultural studies focus can use this resource to analyze authors and works throughout time.
- Gawain This link opens in a new windowThis resource is one part of London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. (art. 3): A Digital Facsimile and Commented Transcription. Publications of the Cotton Nero A.x. Project 3 (Calgary: Cotton Nero A.x. Project, 2012).
For the commented transcription, to be published shortly after this digital facsimile, please see the main Web site of the Cotton Nero A.x. Project
http://www.gawain-ms.ca - Intelex past masters This link opens in a new windowThe Past Masters series encompasses primary source full-text electronic editions in philosophy. Included are collections in the history of political thought and theory, religious studies, education, German studies, sociology, the history and philosophy of science, economics, and classics. InteLex acquires and develops definitive editions of the full corpora of the seminal figures in the history of the human sciences, including published and unpublished works, articles, essays, reviews, and correspondence. Full-text searching may be made within any single volume, across an entire collection, or across all titles.
- Literary manuscripts :17th and 18th century poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds This link opens in a new windowComplete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with the BCMSV database, which includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and a large selection of colour images demonstrating over 320 examples of 17th and 18th century English handwriting.
- British Literary manuscripts online This link opens in a new windowDatabase contains facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials. Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript (note: the text of the manuscripts is not full-text searchable).
- London Low Life : street culture, social reform and the Victorian underworld This link opens in a new windowFull-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 19th and early 20th century London; designed for both teaching and study, from undergraduate to research students and beyond. Will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including literature, cultural studies, urban studies, social history and the study of leisure and tourism. There is a strong emphasis on rare or unique material, particularly in the range of ephemera and street literature available.There is also an emphasis on visual material. The documents are drawn from the holdings of the Lilly Library, the rare books, manuscripts, and special collections library of the Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington.
- Medieval Travel Writing This link opens in a new windowThis collection presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia. The collection also includes a number of important accounts of travels to or through the Holy Land although in this it makes no claims to full or even broad coverage: a separate collection, covering crusading and pilgrimage narratives, would be required for that. It features a number of medieval maps such as the famous ‘Beatus’ and ‘Psalter’ maps, individual manuscript illuminations, and some modern translations of key travel texts.
- Shakespeare Collection (The) This link opens in a new windowWilliam Shakespeare (1564-1616) was perhaps the greatest dramatist the world has ever seen. The Shakespeare Collection contextualizes the legacy of this great poet and playwright, containing a selection of over 200 prompt books (annotated working texts of stage managers and company prompters) from the 17th to 20th centuries, the extensive diaries of Shakespeare enthusiast Gordon Crosse documenting 500 UK performances from 1890 to 1953, the First Folio and Quartos, editions and adaptations of Shakespeare's works from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, more than 80 works Shakespeare is thought to have been familiar with, as well as works composed by Shakespeare's contemporaries.
- World Shakespeare Bibliography This link opens in a new windowProvides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare.
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