English Language and Literature

Portal to the following full-text American and English literature databases: * AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY * AMERICAN POETRY * AMERICAN DRAMA 1714–1915 * CANADIAN POETRY * EARLY AMERICAN FICTION 1789–1850 * EARLY ENGLISH PROSE FICTION * EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION * ENGLISH DRAMA * ENGLISH POETRY, SECOND EDITION * NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION * TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY * TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

Twentieth-Century American Poetry is an unprecedented collection of poetry which allows readers a unique survey of the movements, schools and distinctive voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. With the collaboration of America's leading poetry publishers, the collection brings together 50,000 poems by over 300 poets. The major works of the modernist period – the brittle imagist lyrics of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and William Carlos Williams, the playful and abstract masterpieces of Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings, the symbolist cityscapes of Hart Crane – can be read alongside contemporary works such as the Whitmanesque prophetic verse of Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic lyrics of Elinor Wylie and Edna St Vincent Millay. Major movements of the century are represented, including the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, the Deep Image poetry of Robert Bly and James Wright, underground literature by the Beat poets, the influential feminist works of Adrienne Rich, and the works by the confessional poets. Selected major African American writers such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Imamu Amiri Baraka are included; however, much more comprehensive coverage is given in the complementary Chadwyck-Healey collection Twentieth-Century African American Poetry. Many contemporary writers of the 1980s and 1990s are also included, such as Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Joy Harjo and Thomas Lynch. In addition, Twentieth-Century American Poetry also features two highly distinguished poetry series – the Yale Series of Young Poets and the University of Pittsburgh's Pitt Poetry Series. Full details of works included in the collection are given in the bibliography.

Twentieth-Century African American Poetry is a unparalleled collection of poetry written by the most important and influential African American poets of the twentieth century. Coverage begins with the key writers of the early decades (James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, Claude McKay), continues with major figures of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps and Sterling Brown) and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s (Imamu Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez), and concludes with a considerable body of writing of the 1980s and 1990s, including major figures such as Ai, Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa alongside young writers who have gained recognition through national poetry awards or inclusion within leading print anthologies.

Nineteenth-Century Fiction collects 250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, stretching from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s. Major novelists of the period such as Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and the Brontës feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children’s literature. Nineteenth-Century Fiction represents the great achievements of the Victorian canon and reflects the landmarks of the period, portraying the genre in all its energy and variety, from Gothic horror to social satire, from moral earnestness to aestheticism, from masculine adventure to feminist polemic. In addition to the better-known novels, the collection covers many neglected or little-known works, most of them out of print or difficult to find. Nineteenth-Century Fiction contains 250 complete works of prose fiction by 102 authors from the period 1782 to 1903. Each text is reproduced in full, including all prefatory matter and annotation by the original author. Bibliographic details are included from each of the editions used along with illustrations where available. Full details of the works included in Nineteenth-Century Fiction are given in the bibliography.

English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas. In addition to works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge, English Drama includes the dramatic writings of many more neglected writers long inaccessible in print form. A full list of works included in the collection is given in the bibliography. Contains contents of both the English Prose Drama Database (DLPS version) and the English Verse Drama Database (DLPS version).

Eighteenth-Century Fiction brings together 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700–1780 by writers from the British Isles. It is the largest collection of literature from the period available in electronic form. The eighteenth century saw an enormous increase in the production and publication of prose narratives. It was a period of great creative experiment as the structure and conventions of what would be termed the novel were shaped and developed. Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers students and researchers access to this dynamic period of English literary history. It not only represents all the major writers associated with the 'rise of the novel' - Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne - but also many less well-known, but equally vital and significant figures, such as Penelope Aubin, Richard Graves, Charles Johnstone, Mary de la Rivière Manley and Sarah Scott. Full details of the works included in Eighteenth-Century Fiction are given in the bibliography.

Early English Prose Fiction is a balanced and representative survey of fictional prose in English from the period 1500­­­–1700, comprising more than 200 works. The database includes numerous rare texts inaccessible in print form together with early editions of all the best-known works of the period, such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Many different kinds of fiction are represented, from prose romances (such as Boyle’s Parthenissa) through to popular jest books (such as Peele’s Merrie Conceited Iests and Skelton’s Merie Tales) and specimens of rogue literature (for example Settle’s The Notorious Impostor and the anonymous Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse).

Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century, American Drama 1714–1915 is the largest electronic collection of American dramatic writing of its kind. It provides literary researchers and historians with a comprehensive survey of American dramaturgy from its origins up to the era of sensational melodrama and manners comedy exemplified by the work of such playwrights as David Belasco, Clyde Fitch and William Vaughn Moody. Full details of the works included in American Drama 1714–1915 are given in the bibliography. Early landmark texts represented in the collection include Robert Hunter's satire Androboros (1714), the earliest printed American play, and Thomas Godfrey's tragedy The Prince of Parthia (1765), the first American play professionally performed on an American stage. Highlights from the nineteenth century include George Aiken's stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most popular dramatic works of its period both in America and Europe, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1857) by William Wells Brown, and The Octoroon (1859), widely recognised as Dion Boucicault's most important American-themed play. American Drama 1714–1915 provides exhaustive coverage of the printed record of African American drama to 1915, allowing users to cross-search plays by Ira Aldridge, William Wells Brown, F. B. Coffin, Will Marion Cook, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline E. Hopkins, Jesse Shipp and Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman with the complete canon of American drama. Frequently-studied plays by major dramatists are placed in the context provided by the dramatic writings of lesser-known contemporaries and canonical authors not primarily remembered for their dramatic works, such as Louisa May Alcott and Emma Lazarus.

American Poetry contains over 40,000 poems by more than 200 poets, covering the Colonial period to the early twentieth century, and drawn from over 1,200 printed sources. The collection begins with early Colonial poems such as John Wilson's 'A Song of Thanksgiving for the Lasting Remembrance of God's Wonderful Works' (1603), William Morrell's 'New England' (1625) and the complete works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, and continues through to early twentieth-century writers such as Adelaide Crapsey and Vachel Lindsay. For the first time, major canonical poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and important literary groups, such as the Transcendentalists and the Knickerbocker school, can be read alongside substantial bodies of work by less familiar names such as Elizabeth Akers Allen, Richard Emmons, Lemuel Hopkins and Emma Lazarus.

African American Poetry contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a comprehensive survey of the early history of African American poetry, from the earliest published African American poems to the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poet to achieve national success and recognition. The authors and works included in the collection show the huge variety of this relatively unexplored area of American literary history: coverage includes writers from both North and South, from rural and urban backgrounds, and ranges from University-educated professionals to those for whom the very acts of reading and writing constituted a defiance of Southern slave laws. Generically, poems range from ballads, broadsides and humorous verse to Romantic odes, sonnets and historical epics.