English Language and Literature

North American Theatre Online is a comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. It includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to approximately 30,000 plays, 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, 22,000 productions, and 2,500 production companies. Each year more than 20,000 new records will be added. The collection also includes approximately 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.

Digital archive comprising over 3,250 works by more than 1,250 different authors from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This collection contains over 2 million printed pages of English-language works, many of them comprising multiple volumes. The Corvey Collection includes a considerable number of exceedingly rare publications—and even numerous previously unknown works—by British writers (and women writers in particular, whose works comprise over 1,000 of the titles) who were active during the Romantic period. In addition the collection also includes 3,658 works in French (including more than 500 by women) and 2,653 works in German, all of them dating primarily from the period 1790–1840.

Collections in this Archive

• European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century. The program includes a variety of content types--monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more--and unites them in one central, cross-searchable location. Content is being sourced from around the world: from national libraries; from academic and public libraries; and from a variety of special collections, archives, and repositories.

NCCO currently contains 4 collections: 

• Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange
• British Politics and Society
• British Theatre, Music and Literature: High and Popular Culture
• European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection

NOTE: This product is the updated version of: http://www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/28611

Black Drama, now it its expanded second edition, contains the full text of more than 1,460 plays written
from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 250 playwrights from North America, English-speaking
Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or
out of print. James Vernon Hatch, the playwright, historian, and curator of the landmark Hatch-Billops
Collection, is the project’s editorial advisor. Over 40% of the collection consists of previously unpublished
plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph
Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Each play is extensively and deeply indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching. The
plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance
database, and images. The result is an exceptionally deep and unified collection that illustrates the many
purposes that black theater has served: to give testimony to the ancient foundations of black culture; to
protest injustices; to project emerging images of the New Black; and to give voice to the many and varied
expressions of black creativity.

The works from early twentieth-century America include key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works
performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists through the
1940s. Included are the plays of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Ira
Aldridge, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Edmonds, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller,
Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and many others. The plays address a wide range of struggles and
triumphs, including migration to Northern cities, mothers keeping families together, exploitation by white
land owners, interracial unity, racial violence, civil rights activism, and the black war hero.

American works from the later twentieth century cover the Black Arts movement of the sixties and
seventies, works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble
Company, and other companies. The collection includes plays by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), James
Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Charles Fuller, Ron Milner, Adrienne Kennedy, Anna Deavere Smith, Alice
Childress, Charles Smith, Dael Orlandersmith, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Van Peebles, Joseph Walker,
Richard Wesley, and August Wilson, to name a few. The plays explore themes including civil rights,
desegregation, and a wide range of ideologies—integrationist and separatist, revolutionary and
nationalist.

African and Caribbean drama is represented by a wide collection of plays from Ghana, Uganda, Sierra
Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world.
It includes works by writers such as David Edgecombe, Bode Sewande, Ngugi wa Thiong'o , Femi
Osofisan, Zakes Mda, John Ruganda, Dennis Scott, Zulu Sofola, Paul Boakye, Errol John, Fatima Dike,
Clifford Sealy, Joe de Graft, Richard Rive, Bole Butake, Matsemela Manaka, Errol Hill, and Derrick
Walcott. The plays deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and
apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neocolonialism. Of particular interest is
material written as “Township Theatre” in South Africa under apartheid and during the development of
black grassroots urban theatre.

The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (C.E. 600-1150) of the English language, using twenty-first century technology. The DOE complements the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period C.E. 1100-1500) and the Oxford English Dictionary, the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English.  Under the direction of editors Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, and Antonette diPaolo Healey.

The DOE is based on a computerized Corpus comprising at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English. The total size is almost five times the collected works of Shakespeare. The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed in jewelry. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints' lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms.

The Wing Short Title Catalog (from the "Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700," edited by Donald Wing, et al.) is the essential bibliographic database of extant books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in English between 1641 and 1700. The Catalog lists the title, author name, imprint and physical format as well as including bibliographic information and listings of selected libraries and institutions that hold a copy of the work.

The celebrated Chronicles of England, or "Brut Chronicle", is the earliest prose chronicle in English and was the most popular history of England in the Middle Ages. The Chronicle traces the history of Britain from its earliest (mythical) time (Albinia), including stories of legendary kings such as Brutus of Troy (hence its name), Lear and Arthur, and is quite detailed for the period starting with the reign of Edward I.

A sampling of the papers of Michigan poets from various collections housed at the Bentley Historical Library, featuring handwritten and typed manuscripts, letters and essays as well as photographs, sketches, certificates and other personal items.

Online searchable indexes to and directories of authors, editors, publishers, and titles in poetry and small press publishing. Includes four unique databases which must be searched independently:

• International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses
• Directory of Poetry Publishers
• Directory of Small Press/Magazine Editors & Publishers
• Small Press Record of Books in Print

Contains full text of:

• Jane Austen's Letters. Collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Austen-Leigh, J. E. A Memoir of Jane Austen, and other family recollections. Edited with an introduction and notes by Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• The Novels of Jane Austen. Text based on collation of the early editions, by R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. with revisions. London: Oxford University Press, 1980-1982. The works included in The Novels of Jane Austen are:
  • Vol. 1: Sense and Sensibility
  • Vol. 2: Pride and Prejudice
  • Vol. 3: Mansfield Park and Lovers' Vows, a play
  • Vol. 4: Emma
  • Vol. 5: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
  • Vol. 6. Minor Works: Juvenilia; Lady Susan; Fragments of novels (The Watsons, Sanditon); Plan of a novel; Opinions of Mansfield Park and Emma; Verses; Prayers