English Language and Literature

Contains excerpts by noted critics on 489 of the most significant American authors of the twentieth century. Each author entry gathers a variety of critical approaches and shows the evolution of the critical reception of that author's work. The authors discussed exemplify the best American writing in a variety of genres, from poetry to expository essays, and reflect the diversity of the American experience in the twentieth century. Included as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

5th Edition

Contains biographical and critical essays on 1,328 American women writers covering all genres and all periods of American history. Included as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

2nd Edition

NOTE: a newer version of this product, Black Drama: Second Edition, is available here: http://www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/1078898.

Black Drama contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 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 of black drama, is the project’s editorial advisor. More than a quarter of the collection will consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.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 database covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s. The collection includes musical comedies, domestic dramas, folk dramas, history plays, anti-slavery plays, one-act plays, and other works. Many were published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, others have never before been published or performed.

Students and scholars will have immediate access to plays addressing 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.

Included are the plays of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Ira Aldridge, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. DuBois, William Wells Brown, Owen Dodson, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Randolph Edmonds, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and others.

In addition, the collection covers the Black Arts movement of the sixties and seventies and works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble Company, and other companies.

The plays explore themes including civil rights, desegregation, and a wide range of ideologies – integrationist and separatist, revolutionary and nationalist. While the collection is strong in social and political drama, it also covers domestic drama and satires.

The collection includes works by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ed Bullins, Phillip Hayes Dean, Ted Shine, Aishah Rahman, Paul Carter Harrison, James Baldwin, Rita Dove, Charles Fuller, Ron Milner, Sonia Sanchez, Melvin Van Peebles, Joseph Walker, Richard Wesley, and many others. Dozens of never-before-published works are included.

This collection also brings together 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, Una Marson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jimmi Makotsi, Femi Osofisan, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Duro Lapido, ‘Zulu Sofola, H.I.E Dhlomo, Gus Edwards, Fatima Dike, Alan Paton, Ama Ata Aidoo, Francis D. Imbuga, Joe Coleman de Graft, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Richard Moore Rive, and many others. Dozens of plays in the collection have never been published before. Other works are long out-of-print or hard-to-find.

The plays deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neo-colonialism. Of particular interest is material written as “township theatre” in South Africa under apartheid and the development of black grassroots urban theatre. White Africans are included when they are key writers whose works address important black issues.

 

 

mid-1800s to present

The University of Michigan, NewsBank/Readex Co., and the American Antiquarian Society are cooperating in a Text Creation Partnership to create 6,000 accurately keyed and fully searchable SGML/XML text editions from among the 40,000 titles available in the Evans Early American Imprints Collection. Evans is the most significant collection of titles relating to the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century America, and the Text Creation Partnership seeks to create enduring digital text editions of the most frequently studied works.

The Evans collection consists of the works represented in the American Bibliography by Charles Evans which trace the history of the American colonies that would eventually become the United States. The corpus covers topics as diverse as temperance, witchcraft, slavery, diplomacy and music. The 40,000 works of the Evans corpus is a mainstay for understanding the development of Western culture in general and the Anglo-American world in particular.

1639-1800

Covers more than 31,000 plays published individually or in collections from 1949 to the present, representing a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.  Allows searching for plays by title; author; subject (sisters, culture conflict, marriage); style (symbolism, experimental theater); genre (comedy, melodrama, musical); and cast type.  Includes descriptive annotations with plot summaries, musical requirements, number of sets, scenery requirements, etc.

Indexes plays written from antiquity to the present published from 1949 - present.

A digital edition of the Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, edited and with notes by Edward Waldo Emerson.

1903-1904

A guide to historical records, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world. Contains nearly a million collection descriptions contributed by thousands of libraries, museums, and archives. A combination of brief descriptions derived from catalog records in the RLG Union Catalog, and more detailed archival finding aids harvested from the Internet, including those that conform to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format standard.

Current cumulative file. (Describes archival materials dated from prehistory to the present.)

The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and film. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature. The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Department of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. Such international coverage is represented by literature from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, and while the majority of records are from English-language publications, at least sixty other languages are represented including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish.

The W. B. Yeats Collection database contains the major works of W. B. Yeats in all genres, including poetry, plays, criticism, and fiction, collected in 22 volumes. A single edition of each work, usually the last known to have been approved by Yeats, has been included. However, both of the widely different versions of A Vision (1925 and 1937) have been included.

An index to over 14 million articles in more than 4,250 humanities and social science journals, from their first issues through 1995. Includes full text of articles for 650 of the journals covered. Covers many older journals not indexed electronically anywhere else.

Dates of coverage vary by journal title (most are from first issue to 1995). - 1995