Guide to Online Primary Sources: Literature

This website collects recordings of modern Assyriologists reading ancient Babylonian and Assyrian poetry and literature aloud in the original language.

Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present. The materials have been compiled from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors. Some 30 percent of the collection is fugitive or ephemeral, or has never been published before. The North American coverage extends from William Wells Brown (1814-1884) up to some current authors such as Wanda Coleman and Walter Moseley.

Collection of poetry and fiction produced in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Explore a stunning collection of rare books, games, ephemera, and artwork from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that reveals the socio-cultural history of these times. Showcasing innovative new publishing methods characteristic of the golden age of children’s literature, from mass-produced chapbooks to richly illustrated ‘book-beautifuls’, this resource examines the way in which new concepts were introduced to young readers, encouraging an engagement with the imagination which went on to fundamentally shape established notions of childhood.

Collection of classic and current drama texts. Includes audio and video material.

Browse or search Early American Imprints (Digital Evans), a major collection of 17th and 18th century books and pamphlets based on Charles Evans American Bibliography. On completion will consist of over 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.

Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States, this primary source collection provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first 19 years of the nineteenth century.

Full text and page images of books published in English from 1475-1700. Search by subject, title, author. Will eventually include more than 125,000 books.

Digitization of The Eighteenth Century, a print library covering 150,000 titles and editions published in the United Kingdom 1701-1800. Search by keywords or browse individual books.

A unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays.

Latin American Women Writers is an extensive searchable collection of prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Also included are essays by Latin American feminists and revolutionaries, who address both the universal concerns of women in every age and the distinctive issues of their struggles in the region.

Latino Literature contains approximately 380 plays and 67,500 pages of prose and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States.

Examine complete images of 190 manuscripts of seventeenth and eighteenth-century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with the Brotherton Collection Manuscript Verse Index, 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.

The Berg Collection at New York Public Library is recognised as one of the finest literary research collections in the world, and the Victorian holdings are the undisputed jewel in its crown. Read more about the collection in the Nature and Scope, and uncover the principal authors within the Berg Collection Biographies. Learn about the history of the Berg Collection in commissioned essays, or begin browsing documents.

The Stationers’ Company Archive is one of the most important resources for understanding the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the establishment of legal requirements for copyright provisions and the history of bookbinding. Explore extremely rare documents dating from 1554 to the 21st century in this invaluable resource of research material for historians and literary scholars.

Discover the work of one of the world’s most important publishing dynasties through this collection from the historic John Murray Archive. From book history to travel writing, politics to poetry, this newly digitised resource introduces an unparalleled repository for nineteenth century culture and the literary luminaries who shaped it.

Contains more than 1,000 plays by hundreds of playwrights, written from Colonial times to the present. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. Almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.

Manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Produced in association with the Perdita Project, based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University, the project seeks to rediscover early modern women authors who were “lost” because their writing exists only in manuscript form.

Access to the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, notably the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of the English romanticist William Wordsworth and his fellow writers Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey. The manuscripts, printed verse, correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps are digitized in color. Also in color are over 2,500 art pieces, focusing on the Lake District in Great Britain. Pieces are by significant romantic artists, including John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and John Ruskin.

Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels is a scholarly, primary source database focusing on adult comic books and graphic novels.