Research Guides: *English Literature*: Primary Sources

Medieval and Early Modern Literature

MESA: The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance This link opens in a new window
A web portal and research environment devoted to digital projects concerning the Middle Ages. Many primary texts and images are accessible by subject, author, and other categories. Use the Advanced Search to refine by format, discipline, genre, and so on.

Manuscripts Online
Online primary resources relating to written and early printed culture in Britain during the period 1000 to 1500, including literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed books which are located on websites owned by libraries, archives, universities and publishers.

Medieval & Early Modern Sources Online
- This link opens in a new window
A collection of digitized editions of texts concerning economic, political, legal, and ecclesiastical history, such as treasury accounts, chronicles, papal registers, etc. Most are from England, Ireland, and Scotland, although some are from Milan and the New World.
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Contains digital images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. This collection contains about 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Includes books, pamphlets, manuscripts and newspapers.

Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn)
Web portal and research environment for Renaissance studies. Still in development

Eighteenth-Century Literature

For additional primary and secondary eighteenth-century sources, please see the 18th-Century Sources Guide.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 including books, pamphlets, almanacs, Bibles and treatises. Subjects covered include history, geography, fine arts, medicine, science, literature, language, religion, philosophy and law. Significant collections of women writers, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare are also included.
Early American Imprints: Series I, Evans (1639-1800)
Covers American history and literature from the colonial period to the eighteenth century. Provides full-text digitization of the Early American Imprints microform set, Series I (1639-1800).
18thConnect This link opens in a new window
A web portal and research environment devoted to digital projects concerning the 18th century. Many primary texts and images are accessible by subject, author, and other categories. Use the Advanced Search to refine by format, discipline, genre, and so on.
- Only some content will be available full text.. Please contact a subject librarian to find full-text copies of sources not available in 18thConnect.
American Broadsides & Ephemera: Series I
- This link opens in a new window
Offers fully searchable facsimile images of approximately 15,000 broadsides (1820-1900) and 15,000 pieces of ephemera (1760 -1900) from the American Antiquarian Society collection. Subjects range from contemporary accounts of the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports. Material types include clipper ship sailing cards, early trade cards, bill heads, theater and music programs, stock certificates, menus and invitations documenting civic, political and private celebrations.

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Full text versions of books, magazines, and other materials published in the 19th century. This is a collection in development. Materials now in the database cover Asia and the West, British politics and society, high and popular culture in Britain, and European literature.
Early American Imprints: Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)
Covers American history and literature from the colonial period to the eighteenth century. Provides full-text digitization of the Early American Imprints microform set, Series II (1801-1819). Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States.
Eight Centuries
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Includes over seventy seminal as well as lesser known contemporary indexes to English-language publishing prior to 1930. Access is by genre: 1. Multi-title Periodical Indexes (e.g., Poole's, Legal, Religion, Scientific Papers, etc.); 2. Book Indexes; 3. Newspaper Indexes; 4. Complete Individual Periodical Indexes (e.g., Harper's, Atlantic Monthly,etc.); 5. US Patents; Hansard's; US and UK Historical Government Documents
American Broadsides & Ephemera: Series I
- This link opens in a new window
Offers fully searchable facsimile images of approximately 15,000 broadsides (1820-1900) and 15,000 pieces of ephemera (1760 -1900) from the American Antiquarian Society collection. Subjects range from contemporary accounts of the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports. Material types include clipper ship sailing cards, early trade cards, bill heads, theater and music programs, stock certificates, menus and invitations documenting civic, political and private celebrations.
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a peer-reviewed collection of digital projects on the the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American. Useful for identifying primary sources.
Nineteenth Century British Library Newspapers
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Browseable and searchable online collection of historical British newspapers, scanned in their original format. Covers 1800-1900.
Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Contains nearly 600 periodicals published in Great Britain from 1800-1900.

Wright American Fiction
Digitized fiction from Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1957; revised 1965). This project's coverage now extends throughout most of the 19th century.

Twentieth-Century Literature

N.B.: In the United States, most works published before 1923 are in the public domain, but finding full-text material after that date often requires looking for it in libraries, archives, or in subscription databases. To find full-length books published after 1923, search Tripod (for items in the Tri-College libraries) or WorldCat (for items in libraries around the United States and the world).

Below is a sample of the kinds of projects and sources for early-20th-century literature for which you might search:

Index of Modernist Magazines
A rich source of information on modernist magazines, including links to full-text sources such as the Modernist Journals Project, a joint endeavor of Brown University and the University of Tulsa to provide digitized copies of "significant magazines from around the early 20th century," covering 1890 to 1922, with a "geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published."
First World War Poetry Digital Archive
"An online repository of [more than] 7,000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research."

Eight Centuries
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Includes some material up to 1930.

African-American Poetry of the Twentieth Century
An online collection of African-American poetry from Literature Online (LION)
American Poetry of the Postwar Period, 1945-1999
An online collection of poetry from Literature Online (LION)
British Poetry of the Postwar Period, 1945-1999
An online collection of poetry from Literature Online (LION)
The James Joyce Scholars' Collection
A collaboration between Professor David Hayman and the UW-Madison Libraries that makes available digitized copies of important, out-of-print scholarship on James Joyce.
Woolf Online
A digital, interactive edition of "Time Passes," which forms the central sequence from Virginia Woolf's novel 'To the Lighthouse' (1927). The site includes the first draft of the text, the Initial Holograph Draft, and the private and public histories of its composition, all dynamically linked, making it possible to read each day's draft in the context of the rest of Woolf's activities. [adapted from the site description]

Multi-Period Collections

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
The DPLA allows you to search millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the library or other content provider's website.
Europeana This link opens in a new window
Use Europeana to search through millions of digitized books, art, newspapers, and other sources from European museums, galleries and national libraries.
Google Books This link opens in a new window
Online library of more than a million books digitized from the collections of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and many other university libraries. The complete texts are available for books in the public domain - principally books printed before 1923. A potential source of published travel accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges are members of HathiTrust. Click on "Log In" and select your college for full access.
Internet Archive This link opens in a new window
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that is building an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes more than 300,000 texts, as well as audio, moving images, software and archived web pages. A good source for books printed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including many travel accounts.

Literature Online (LION): Texts
A multi-period online collection of Anglophone texts from 600 AD to the present.

Readex AllSearch
Readex AllSearch allows you to search across all subscribed Readex historical collection at once, quickly and seamlessly.

The Reading Experience Database (RED), 1450–1945
An open-access database and research project with more than 30,000 records of reading experiences of British subjects, both at home and abroad, and of visitors to the British Isles, between 1450 and 1945.