Literature Resources: Reference Materials

A great starting g place for quick reference.

Provides full text information on thousands of authors and their works including: study guides; plot summaries; articles of literary criticism; full text of literary journals; and author biographies.

A guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources.

Contains 440 works of 80 novelists and short-story writers, 1774-1850. This database comprises the full texts of the first editions of American novels and short stories written before 1850 by authors of significance during their lifetimes.

Contains 52,000 poems from collected works and individual volumes of poetry covering the works of most major twentieth-century American poets.

A collection of 1,200 books and anthologies of early American poetry providing access to 40,000 poems of American writers from the 17th to the early 20th century.

Contains more than 700 plays from over 300 dramatists of American dramatic literature.

Provides descriptions of literary works of American writers from the American Revolution to 1930.

Contains the full text of English prose from the period 1700-1780.

Contains the full text of over 44,000 poems by 288 poets.

Contains the full text of poems from British Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries, between the years 600 and 1900.

Full text plays that were written or intended for the stage from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century.

Full text of poetry intended for the stage from the late thirteenth century through the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods to the end of the nineteenth century.

Includes the full text of the major editions of Shakespeares works.

Full text contains classic works of French literature to from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts.

Descriptive records for major European national, university and research library holdings representing the history of printing and the history of the book.

Versions of the Bible in full text.