English Language and Literature

Fully indexed, cross-searchable database of about 100 dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. Includes subject reference works in the humanities, social sciences, and science.

Includes latest editions of reference works published in recent years.

The print MED, completed in 2001, has been described as "the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America." Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.

1100 - 1500

Page images and searchable full-text of Early American Imprints, Series I Evans & Series I Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1670-1800. Covers every aspect of American life including history, literature, religion and foreign affairs. Contains of a range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties and more.

1639-1800

The University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and Gale (part of Cengage Learning) have cooperated in a Text Creation Partnership to make freely available 2,231 accurately keyed and fully searchable SGML/XML text editions from among the 150,000 titles available in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database. ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

The ECCO collection consists of the works represented in the English Short Title Catalogue between 1701 and 1800. The corpus contains a diverse number of materials including not only books and broadsides but also Bibles, tract books, sermons, and printed printed ephemera by many well-known and lesser-known authors. The 150,000 works of the ECCO corpus captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain, and is essential in order to understand the context of the French, Industrial, and American Revolutions.

1701-1800

An index to more than 250,000 short stories written in or translated into English that have appeared in over 4,200 collections and anthologies, and in the hundreds of periodicals covered by Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and Humanities Index. Includes full text of nearly 5,000 stories, with links to the full text of thousands more available in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Includes stories originally published since 1830 that have appeared in collections, anthologies and periodicals published from 1915 - present.

Contains eleven major editions from the First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863–66, twenty-eight separate contemporary printings of individual plays and poems, selected apocrypha, and related works. In addition, it contains more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the whole of Bell's Acting Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1774).

Editorial Policy: No attempt has been made to standardise the different conventions adopted by the various editors of Shakespeare's texts. The user should refer to the editors' own introductions for explanations of their particular practices. Act and scene numbering follows the source texts throughout; the user will inevitably encounter irregularities, particularly in early editions, where attributions to Shakespeare may be found to be at variance with modern consensus.

The Editions: The contents have been chosen under the guidance of two Executive Editors with further advice from an international Editorial Advisory Board of Shakespeare scholars to provide a balanced collection of editions and adaptations from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the adaptations included in the database will be unfamiliar even to Shakespearean scholars and, in order to provide some guidance as to the provenance and stage history of these works, brief notes have been included at the beginning of each play, for which we are indebted to Professor Michael Dobson of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Texts: In the great majority of cases, texts have been captured entire, with all introductions, prefaces, appendices, indices, notes editorial and authorial, essays, tables, figures, illustrations etc. reproduced in full. Half-title pages, publisher's advertisements and decorations have not been captured. Hypertext links have been created to connect editorial matter to the texts whenever possible. 

New web version of the most complete and authoritative dictionary of the English language. Provides definitions, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words, past and present, from across the English-speaking world, with over 3 million quotations documenting how and when they have been used over time. Also incorporates the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, where words are arranged by their meaning rather than alphabetically.

Third Edition (in progress since 2000), with Second Edition (1989) entries (gradually being replaced).

Contains full text essays outlining the lives and careers of American and British authors from all eras and genres and summarizing the critical response to their work. Includes lists of principal works by, and further readings about each author profiled.

Current cumulative edition.

A collection of Middle English texts including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales & Troilus and Criseyde, Langland's Piers Plowman, Malory's Morte Darthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Everyman, and many others. This collection of Middle English texts was assembled from works contributed by University of Michigan faculty and from texts provided by the Oxford Text Archive.

1100 -1500

Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 50,000 pages and an estimated 8,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present. The materials have been compiled from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors. Some 30 percent of the collection is fugitive or ephemeral, or has never been published before.

The project unifies an astounding variety of traditions ranging from early African oral traditions to today’s hip-hop. It covers fables, parables, ballads, folk-tales, short story cycles, and novellas—all the writings included will have fewer than 10,000 words.

mid 1900's to the present