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Literature Research & Critical Theory

This guide is for English majors and anyone else interested in locating information about authors and their works.

Primary Source Websites for Literature

American Writers Museum
American Writers Museum founded by Malcolm O'Hagan "connects visitors with their favorite authors and writings from more than five centuries, while inspiring the discovery of new works of every type - poetry, lyrics, speeches, drama, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and more. 

British Library Online Gallery
The online gallery contains old maps, virtual books, online exhibitions, illuminated manuscripts, photographs, stamps, and much more.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Hosted at MIT since 1993, this site contains the first web edition of the complete works of Shakespeare.

Cornell Digital Wordsworth Collection
The collection contains comprehensive book holdings on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and related authors including letters, manuscripts, broadsides, pictures, documents, and objects relating to Wordsworth and his family.

Digital Public Library of America
DPLA contains photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and much more from America's libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions which are freely available in digital format.

Digital Sciptorium
​The DS consortium comprises a variety of institutions, from large research universities to small public libraries and private museums with collections of assorted size and significance, from a few single leaves to hundreds of bound volumes of pre-modern manuscripts

Internet Archive
The archive is a non-profit digital library which contains freely available books, software, music, as well as thousands of archived web pages.

Library of Congress Digital Collections
The digital collections include historic American newspapers, historic American buildings, cities and towns, general maps, civil war information and maps, panoramic maps, railroad maps, transportation and communication, country studies, photographs,and more.

London Lives
London Lives makes available in a fully searchable form a wide range of primary sources related to eighteenth century London. 

Project Bartleby
Batleby.com publishes thousands of free online classics of reference, literature, and non-fiction.


Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 56,000 free eBooks: Choose among free e-pub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. Included are older works for which copyright has expired. 

Victorian Women Writers Project
The VWWP began in 1995 at Indian University and focuses on showcasing the lesser known women writers of the nineteenth century. The collection includes poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more.