9. Selected Electronic Texts
Online Databases
Literature Online (LION) is a collection of texts, indexes, and reference tools. It includes over 340,000 works of poetry, drama and prose. Primary texts include English poetry from 600 to the present, American and African-American poetry from 1603 to the present, The Faber Poetry Library, English drama from 1280 to 1915 and English prose from 1500 to 1900. Secondary sources include LIFT, a literary journal index with full-text of selected articles, the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature from 1920 onwards (with links to articles from the JSTOR collection), the King James Bible, Webster's Dictionary, and links to other Web resources and biographical information on authors.
ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
Background Note
A collaboration between the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University of Chicago, the ARTFL database presents full texts of nearly 2,000 works representing a broad range of written French--in literature, philosophy, arts, economics and sciences. Novels, verse, theatre, journalism, essays, correspondence and treatises are included covering the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. The database is intended for literary and linguistic analysis, with advanced concordance capabilities. In addition to the texts described above, ARTFL has separate databases of Provençal poetry and French women writers and the B.A.S.I.L.E. database of over 1000 prose works in full text. ARTFL hosts an electronic version of Diderot's and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and serves as a portal for the University of Chicago's other collaborative electronic projects.
Searching for texts and words in texts
From the main page, three links will be of particular interest:
Select the Main ARTFL Database: FRANTEXT to search keywords in texts or to browse the bibliography of authors/texts included. Click on SEARCH and enter terms such as Author, Title, Genre (e.g. theatre), date (e.g. a range, 1650-1690, for example) or any combination of these terms. You may also search for words in the texts by adding terms in the "search text(s) for:______."
More searchable texts are located in the New Additions section of the site. The search protocols described above are available for this collection of texts, as well.
ARTFL Collaborations link will lead to the B.A.S.I.L.E. database, a collection of prose/narrative works from all periods. Hugo's Les Misérables, for example, will be here, readable and searchable in full-text.
ARTFL's Reference Works link will lead to the dictionaries mentioned below.
Extensive help and other instructions are located in the User Manual links from each of the above collections.
(Note: You will want to search both FRANTEXT and the New Additions for authors/texts. For Baudelaire, for example, you will find FRANTEXT contains Petits Poèmes en Prose (1962 Garnier editions) and New Additions contains Les Fleurs du Mal (1942 edition) and Petits Poèmes en Prose (1954 Gallimard edition).
The Dartmouth Dante Project database combines computer technology with more than 600 years of commentary tradition on Dante Alighieri's major poem, the Divina Commedia. This gives scholars easier access to the full texts of important critical works, many of which are rare and difficult to obtain. Searchable by commentator, cantica, canto number, language, line number, notes, publication date, text.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digitized versions of titles listed in the following reference sources:
Pollard & Redgrave's A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640 ("STC I") and
Donald Wing's A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700 ("STC II") “
A search which limits to language (in keyword) may retrieve works in languages other than English, although most of the works in the database are in English. (e.g. La Fayette and kw: French will yield French editions).
Eighteenth Century Collections Online/ECCO
Access to digital images of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more. Texts can be searched by author, title, full text, front matter, indexes, place of publication and publisher. Languages include Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Welsh. Illustrations can also be searched.
Begun in 1997 as the major digitization project at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica includes full-text of over 100,000 volumes and 300,000 images covering the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century material. Residing in Gallica are dictionaires and encyclopedias, journals, manuscripts, recordings and images. Various collections compose "Les Dossiers de Gallica," such as Gallica Classique (Garnier editions), le dossier Proust, Voyages en France and Voyages en Afrique.
From the main page, click on "Recherche" to search for literary texts (by title words, author, subject) or to search for words in texts via "recherche libre."
Women Writers Online
The Brown University Women Writers Project, in its own words, " is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. We support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship."
The site offers two methods of access to its online English literature texts: one, the full collection, Women Writers Online, and second, a subset of texts, Renaissance Women Online (RWO). To access Women Writers Online, select its link on the Women Writers Project home page. Then, to access Renaissance Women Online, select the RWO link on the Women Writers Online page. The full collection, Women Writers Online, presents all WWP texts currently available online, covering a period from 1400 to 1850. All of these texts can be browsed, searched, and analyzed using tools which provide access to the full SGML encoding. In addition, the site Renaissance Women Online offers an online environment for teaching and research in the field of Renaissance women's writing. When complete, it will present a group of 100 WWP texts from the early modern period, together with introductions to the individual works and essays on the cultural context of the period.
Contains dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. It is a fully-indexed, cross-searchable database of these books. A broad subject range from titles in the Oxford Companions Series is available, as well as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Portals
University of Virginia
Library Electronic Text Center
Humbul Humanities Hub
Humanities Text Initiative
English Literature on the Web
Online Books Page