Austen Said: Patterns of Diction in Jane Austen's Major Novels
From University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Allows users to visualize and analyze the language patterns of Austen's most popular works. Word frequencies is a place to begin. View data about unique vocabularies of particular characters in a novel. Or, compare vocabularies used by characters sharing the same age, gender, or character type (such as cad, fool, or heroine). In the novel visualization section view highlighted examples of free indirect discourse, a technique Austen used. Search tool allows user to find select words or phrases in all six of her published novels.
British Fiction allows users to examine bibliographical records of 2,272 works of fiction written by approximately 900 authors, along with a large number of contemporary materials (including anecdotal records, circulating-library catalogues, newspaper advertisements, reviews, and subscription lists).
CELM Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700
The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 provides a complete catalogue of literary manuscripts by 237 British authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It offers descriptions of more than 37,000 manuscript texts of poems, plays, discourses, translations, etc., as well as notebooks, annotated printed books, corrected proofs, promptbooks, letters, documents and other related manuscript materials, many hitherto unrecorded, found in several hundred public and private collections world-wide.
CELT Corpus of Electronic Texts
CELT contains a wealth of Irish literary and historical culture. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of over 19 million words, in 1636 contemporary and historical documents in many subject areas, including literature, medicine, and the other arts. Includes introductions, background information, graphics, translations where possible, and scholarly bibliographies.
Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP)
Contains every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing to 1660. Database created by Alan B. Farmer, Ohio State U. and Zachary Lesser, U. of Pa. Contains single playbooks as well as collections of them. For scholars of 15th, 16th, and 17th c. English lit.
A daily diary kept by "increasingly-important" civil servant Samuel Pepys from 1660 to 1670. See the Summary of Pepys's diary under The Diary tab, before browsing the full text by date (under All Entries). Letters section contains correspondances to and from Peyps. In-depth articles on topics like "The Garden at the Navy Office." See the Encyclopedia, which has entries for "5,077 people, places and things," from Pepy's time, offering contextual significance and history. Map has markers denoting places mentioned. A project of web designer and actor Phil Gyford assisted by Project Gutenberg from whence the full text comes.
Dictionary of the Scots Language
The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the 12-volume Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) Main PE 2106 .C7 and the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary (SND) Main PE 2106 .S4. DOST contains information about Scots words in use from the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries (Older Scots); and SND contains information about Scots words in use from 1700 to the 1970s (modern Scots). Together these 22 volumes provide a comprehensive history of Scots, and a New Supplement now (2005) brings the record of the language up to date. These are essential research tools for anyone interested in the history of either Scots or English language, and for historical or literary scholars whose sources are written in Scots or may contain Scots usages. In the DSL, these two dictionaries are being published together in their full form for the first time. Thus, information on the earliest uses of Scots words can be presented alongside examples of the later development of the same words.
Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED)
Explore over 400 early modern English plays that were performed in London's professional theaters between 1576 and 1642. The Anthology features fully searchable descriptions of 403 plays, with links to further resources.There are also 40 documentary editions of the first printing of works such as Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Project of the Folger Library.
Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic
DASG is an online repository of digitised texts and lexical resources for Scottish Gaelic, with two main components, Corpas na Gàidhlig and the Fieldwork Archive. The former aims to provide a comprehensive electronic corpus of Scottish Gaelic texts for students and researchers of Scottish Gaelic language, literature and culture. It is also the textual basis for the interuniversity project, Faclair na Gàidhlig (Dictionary of the Scottish Gaelic Language), upon which the future historical dictionary of Gaelic will be based. The DASG Fieldwork Archive is a collection of vernacular materials (questionnaires, wordlists and sound recordings) collected throughout Gaelic Scotland and in Nova Scotia between the 1960s and 1980s as part of data collection for the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic (HDSG) project, which was based at the Department of Celtic between 1966 and 1997.
Discovering Literature: British Library
Immersive experience into five historical periods of British literature, focusing on the social, cultural, and political contexts of iconic and lesser-known works. The five periods: 20th c., Romantics and Victorians, Restoration and 18th c., Shakespeare and the Renaissance, medieval. Explore each time period through feature articles, thematic essays, and biographical sketches. Contains several thousand literature works digitized from the B.M., B.L., and other repositories.
Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database
This is an online database designed for the study of eighteenth-century English phonology, which will allow users to investigate the social, regional and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-century English. Search full texts of eighteenth-century English language dictionaries for various phonological elements.
Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive
From University of Oxford's Alexander Huber. A peer-reviewed, award-winning digital archive and research project on the poetry of the long 18th-c. Two parts, digital poetry catalog and research/analysis of the texts. Texts expand on those of ECCO database. Features over 3,000 poems by 320 authors. Continually updated. See "Take the tour" button in top right to learn the features.
English Server Drama Collection
In 1885, popular British writer Annie Edwards penned A Girton Girl. The title refers to Girton College, part of the University of Cambridge network and the first residential college for women in Britain. Despite the title, the main character in this novel does not attend Girton, yet the story nevertheless provides contemporary readers with a glimpse into Victorian ideas about gender roles in education and society. Here readers may browse the fully digitized book, along with a number of Edwards's other novels, courtesy of Oxford University and the Internet Archive. While published in limited numbers at the time, many of Edwards's novels were serialized in newspapers throughout the late nineteenth century or adapted for the theater. This resource will be of interest to literary and history scholars alike as it offers historical context and insight into popular literature at the turn of the twentieth century.
Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field.
Helsinki Corpus of English Texts
The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts is a structured multi-genre diachronic corpus, which includes periodically organized text samples from Old, Middle and Early Modern English. Each sample is preceded by a list of parameter codes giving information on the text and its author. The Corpus is useful particularly in the study of the change of linguistic features in long diachrony. It can be used as a diagnostic corpus giving general information of the occurrence of forms, structures and lexemes in different periods of English.
History of English in Ten Minutes
Humorous, sound bite, animated video in ten minutes. Click on chapter title, then on the start arrow below left of the screen where the video plays. Done by Open University.
To celebrate the 400th year of Shakespeare's death, 2016, Oxford University Press is offering, for free, the best of its Shakespeare online resources: blogs, videos, articles, books, infographics, more.
The subject of this website is the genealogy of the Austen family: Jane Austen's ancestors; the descendants of her brothers; and details of many of the other families associated with them. It begins with Joan Corder's Akin to Jane - the first genealogical study of George Austen and Cassandra Leigh's descendants. This work, written in 1953, has until now only been available in manuscript. Research since then has revealed vastly more information. Joan Corder listed just over 300 individuals, but there are now more than 1200 on record with many still missing. In addition, I have done a great deal of work on the Austens' ancestors. Details will be found on the Austen Genealogy link.
"Literary History is an index to free scholarly and critical articles, covering more than 300 English and American authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. With over 7,000 citations, we have the largest collection of free links on these authors on the internet. All links are screened by a literary scholar and must meet minimum academic standards to be included in the index." Good, reputable resource for free scholarship and general information on literature.
Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe's Languages
Presents an alternate view of European cultures: rather than geographic and territorial borders defining the outlines of Western Europe, the Indo-European language families are used to depict relationships and to rethink the way we view proximity.
This resource helps readers understand and read Old English, with useful tools for both novice and experienced OE learners. Course Index, with topical modules on nouns, verbs, syntax, more. Pronunciation Guide, with notes and embedded audio. Home page links to a beginner's guide and brief history. Site created 2018 by Victoria Koivisto-Kokko as part of her master's thesis at University College, Cork. Dr. Tom Birkett also contributed.
Open source scholarly editions of public domain literature. With material on literary knowledge that surrounds a text. All content accessible through a Creative Commons license.
Piers Plowman Electronic Archive
Collaborative open-access project, presents the rich textual tradition of Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision attributed to William Langland. Three distinct versions of the poem (A, B, and C) survive in more than 50 unique manuscripts, none in Langland's own hand. The Archive enables instructors, students, and researchers to explore late medieval literary and manuscript culture through the many variations of Piers Plowman. The long-term goal of the project is the creation of a complete archive of the medieval and early modern textual tradition of Langland's poem.
Price of One Penny: a Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860
By Marie Leger-St. Jean, U. of Cambridge. Price One Penny: Cheap Literature, 1837-1860 (POP). contains a database which catalogues early Victorian penny fiction and thereby enables easy access to surviving copies and accurate bibliographic information. Search by title. Browse by authors, publishers, periodicals, and libraries that have such works in their collections.
From University of Iowa. A social network analysis of publishers, writers, manuscripts, and booksellers in the late-fifteenth through eighteenth century England. Created by a team of English scholars and librarians, along with a computer scientist, this project allows English and history scholars to explore metadata compiled from the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) - a catalogue of [most] every book printed in England between 1473 and 1800. Visitors can explore this data in three ways. In Social Network Analytics, visitors can explore a network map between two specific dates (e.g. 1473-1500) and search for specific individuals within a graph. Alternatively, visitors may explore publications by decade or conduct a text search of the catalogue.
Database that attempts to locate and describe all extant copies of all editions of Shakespeare's works through 1700, excluding the four folio editions.
From the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Brings together high-res images, descriptions, and transcriptions of all known references and allusions to Shakespeare, his family, and his writings, almost entirely from his own lifetime. Over 30 institutions have contributed to the effort. Chief partners include the Bodleian Library, the British Library, The National Archives, and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
A prototype that collects full-color, high-quality digital images and TEI-encoded text of 32 quarto editions of a single play, Hamlet. Need to use Google Chrome or Safari browsers to display. Shakespeare in Quarto is similar, works in all browsers, has less advanced viewer technology, and brings together many existing quarto editions of his plays, which predate the famous folio editions.
Offers digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this family contained today in the Huntington Library, British Library, and the Houghton Library. Together these institutions have over 90% of the known relevant mss.
From Cambridge University, Washington Univ., St. Louis, and U. of South Carolina. Biographical information, critical bibliography of his works, podcast series, contents of the Spencer Review, abstracts, copies of his original works.
Site from Edinburgh includes full-text of Scott's works, as well as Biography and Bibliography materials.
Wordsworth 250 For the Love of Nature
2020 is the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wordsworth. To celebrate, his 50 descendants had planned an in person celebration in his beloved Lake District. This is not taking place, due to the coronavirus pandemic. To replace it, they began reading their favorite Wordsworth poems online and others joined them. And now they are attempting to collect 250 readings of his poems. You can join in or listen to others reading, or both.