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Alex
Catalogue of Electronic Texts
“The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a [searchable] collection
of public domain documents from American and English literature as
well as Western philosophy.”
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Bibliomania
"Bibliomania offers . . . a superb educational
resource with the full text of classic world literature and
important non-fiction texts supported by an extensive reference
section. [Their] study guides provide the best in current academic
analysis and the Well Red magazine the best in contemporary reviews,
articles and interviews.”
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Blackmask Online
A
private enterprise offering 12649 books online ranging in genre from
western, pulp fiction, folklore, and nautical, searchable by author
and title.
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BoondocksNet Editions
Offers “etexts of complete books on imperialism,
literature, political cartoons, photographs, and reform movements,
by authors ranging from Jane Addams and George Ade to Robert Louis
Stevenson and Mark Twain.” Indexed by author and title as well as
by “Special Collections” like “Labor History and Literature” and
“Imperialism and War.”
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Christian Classics
Ethereal Library
"Classic Christian books in electronic format” from St. Augustine to
John Wesley.
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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Hosted by MIT, the site offers not only Shakespeare’s
complete works but also a search engine and discussion forums.
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The English
Server Drama Collection
The “site contains a collection of original plays and
screenplays, criticism and links to other sites concerned with
theatre. It publishes both classic and contemporary works . . .,”
from Aristophanes to Ibsen, and includes a brief criticism section.
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The English
Server Fiction Collection
The “site offers works of and about
fiction collected from our members, contributing authors worldwide,
and texts in the public domain” and includes short fiction, novels,
poetry, magazines, and criticism.
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Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts
Hosted by the University of Pittsburg, the site
offers full texts of and commentary on myths and folklore organized
by both categories (animal brides, folk tales about hairless men,
mother and child, etc.) and authors (Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian
Anderson, etc.).
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Great Books
Online
“The
preeminent Internet publisher of literature, reference and verse
providing students, researchers and the intellectually curious with
unlimited access to books and information on the web, free of
charge.”
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Ibiblio: The
Public’s Library and Digital Archive
Home to one of the largest "collections of
collections" on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely
available information, including software, music, literature, art,
history, science, politics, and cultural studies. Ibiblio.org is a
collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and The University
of North Carolina--Chapel Hill.
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The Internet
Classics Archive
Hosted by MIT, this site offers “441 [searchable] works of classical
literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary
and ‘reader's choice’ Web sites. Mainly Greco-Roman works (some
Chinese and Persian), all in English translation.”
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The
Internet Library of Early Journals: A Digital Library of 18th
and 19th Century Journals
The site is “a joint project by the Universities of
Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the
auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. It aimed to
digitise substantial runs of 18th and 19th
century journals, and make these images available on the Internet,
together with their associated bibliographic data.”
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The Internet
Public Library
Hosted by the University of Michigan, the IPL bills itself as “the
first public library of and for the Internet community.” Offers a
vast array of resources, including literature by time period, a
reference center, and reading rooms for magazines and newspapers.
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KnowledgeRush Book Directory
This repository of popular classics like 20,000
Leagues under the Sea, Dracula, and Anna Karenina
is searchable by author, title, and genre and includes some
historical documents and biographies.
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Luminarium
Extensive and glitzy, the site includes period art and music to
present literature of the Medieval, Renaissance, and 17th
Century and includes quotations from, information on the life and
works, and additional sources for most authors. Aesthetically
appealing and scholarly.
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The Online Books Page
Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, the site
offers over 20,000 texts searchable by author, title, or subject.
Includes a “Celebration of Women Authors” and banned books. Links
to other sources, including Project Guttenberg.
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An Online
Library of Literature
Offers a limited list:
Aesop, Bronte,
Cather, Twain, and the like.
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Page by
Page Books
“Most
sites with online books have the whole book on one page, forcing you
to wait while the whole thing downloads. Even worse, if you don't
read the whole book in one sitting, how do you keep track of where
you are? Do you really want to have to look through thousands of
lines to find where you left off? Some sites are better in that they
put one chapter per page. Even this is hard. What if you get
interrupted in the middle of the chapter? How do you bookmark it? To
fill this void, PageByPageBooks.com was created. Read a little or a
lot, sneak in a few pages over lunch then read some more after
dinner, no matter how much you read at a time, you can bookmark it
and come back to exactly the right place.”
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People with a History: An Online Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
and Trans History
Hosted by Fordham University, the site “presents the history of
lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people [=LGBT]. It
includes hundreds of original texts, discussions, and [soon] images,
and addresses LGBT history in all periods, and in all regions of the
world.”
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The
Perseus Digital Library
Hosted by Tufts University, “Perseus is an evolving
digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and
language. Our primary goal is to bring a wide range of source
materials to as large an audience as possible. We anticipate that
greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities
will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of
research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas.”
The site offers some interesting coverage: Greek and Latin classics;
papyri; English Renaissance and London literature; California, Upper
Midwest, and Chesapeake literature; and the history of science.
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Project
Guttenberg
"[T]he
Internet's oldest producer of FREE electronic books (eBooks or
eTexts),” Project Guttenberg offers the
most comprehensive list of pre-1923 literature, from the
classics (Shakespeare, Dante, Poe) to less high-brow favorites like
Carroll, Doyle, Burroughs). Volunteers select and type the
offerings.
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Representative Poetry Online
Hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries, this
indexed site offers searchable lists of poets, titles, first lines,
and keywords; a timeline, calendar, glossary of poetic terms and
forms; and poetry criticism, bibliographies, and links.
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Short
Stories at East of the Web
In addition to classic authors (Guy de Maupassant,
Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton), this rare site also offers
contemporary authors organized by theme: children’s, crime, fiction,
horror, humor, non-fiction, romance, sci-fi, and hyperfiction.
Fully searchable. Infrequent pop-ups.
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Sonnet Central
Sonnet Central is “an archive of English sonnets,
commentary, pictures, and relevant web links. Sonnets are grouped by
period below and can also be accessed quickly via an alphabetical
list of authors. . . . All of the sonnets included here (as well
as most of those that are linked) are modernized texts for the
general reader and are not presented for purposes of
scholarly work.”
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The
Victorian Women Writers Project
“The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is
to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women
writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML). The works, selected with the assistance of
the Advisory Board, will include anthologies, novels, political
pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry
and verse drama. Considerable attention will be given to the
accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate
bibliographical descriptions of them.” Hosted by Indiana
University.
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ReadingLinks.com "started in May 2001, is
a joint project of Myron Tuman and Karen H. Gardiner" and "is
dedicated to changing how college students access the general
interest reading materials that have been so widely used in freshman
composition and other lower-division courses" by "collecting at this
one site the very best readings, on a huge variety of topics, that
are freely distributed on the Web, although often in scattered and
hard to find places."
