Library Guide - English Literature

You will find the majority of the English Literature book collection at classmark 808-809, 821-823 on the 3rd floor of Augustine House.

821 English Poetry

822 English Drama

823 English Fiction

Remember to check the different areas housing the 7-day loan and 4-week loans. Children’s fiction is located in the Curriculum Resources Collection on the 2nd Floor of Augustine House.

The library has hundreds of relevant e-books which you can access by logging into your account on Library Search. Simply limit your results in the Library Resources tab of the search screen to e-books and click on the link to CCCU e-book to download or read online. You’ll find we have some amazing titles such as Jennie Batchelor’s The history of British women’s writing and Susan Civale’s Romantic women’s life writing: reputation and afterlife.

You can find reference works such as the Oxford English Dictionary – one of the most authoritative dictionaries of the English language and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography via the Find Database A to Z link on Library Search.

If you are looking for works of fiction, you will find many classical and contemporary works of fiction via the Overdrive platform. It includes audiobooks as well as ebooks. Overdrive titles can be read using the Libby app.

The following e-book collections are available via the Find Database A to Z link on Library Search. Remember to log in to Library Search using your computing username and password to access the full-text.

• Early English Books Online (EEBO). From Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare to the English Civil War. Includes works by Erasmus, Shakespeare, King James I, Marlowe, Galileo, Caxton, Chaucer, Malory, Boyle, Newton, Locke, More, Milton, Spenser, Bacon, Donne, Hobbes, Purcell, Behn, and Defoe. You can read the guide here.
  
  
• Eighteenth Century Collection.  A collection of historical books published in the United Kingdom focused on Language & Literature, Literary And Political Reviews, General Interest Periodicals--United Kingdom, Law, Philosophy & Religion, Fine & Performing Arts, Social Sciences, History, and History--History of North And South America.
  
  
• Nineteenth-Century Fiction - A collection of 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.
  
  
• Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) provides full-text access to hundreds of editions with authoritative editorial notes directly alongside the text and advanced search between or within editions. CCCU provides access to the following collections:
  
  ● Latin Prose
  ● Medieval Prose
  ● 18th Century Prose

Oxford Research Encyclopedias – Access to some useful content. Browse by subfield e.g. genre or era and limit your search by availability to unlocked and free.

Project Gutenberg – Freely available ebooks. Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, M.E. Braddon, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Cholmondeley, Lewis Caroll, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Wood and many more.

Journals (also known as Periodicals) are similar to magazines in that they are published regularly but are written by academics and researchers rather than journalists. The subject matter can be very detailed but will be rigorously researched and backed up with evidence. The hallmark of a good journal will be footnotes or in-text citations and a bibliography of reading to evidence research. They are also often peer-reviewed which means they have been through a thorough editorial process. You can find print copies of journals on the 2nd floor of Augustine House in the silent zone located near the lifts. These are for use in the library only. Why not take a peek at The Poetry Review or Victorian Literature and Culture?

You can access online journals such as Contemporary Literature, The Henry James Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Nineteenth Century Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Shakespeare Quarterly via Library Search. To find out more about journals published in the discipline of literature, you can use an app such as Browzine. Not only does it store all your favourite journals, it enables you to easily find and read the most recent issue from your mobile device (and store them in a bibliographic management tool such as Zotero or Mendeley).

For nineteenth century literary periodicals you can access the British Periodicals Collections or Gale Primary Sources via Find Databases A to Z on Library Search. These include titles such as The Cornhill Magazine (1860-1975) a literary journal edited by William Thackeray which serialised Henry James’s Daisy Miller.

Finding journal articles by topic

Sometimes you may want to look for journal articles on a specific topic, such as dystopian fiction or romanticism. You don’t have to browse for articles using Browzine, but can use a search engine such as the CCCU search tool Library Search or Google Scholar. Both are good, but they have different functions and it is important to be aware of that. Google Scholar searches scholarly material, but you may not be able to access all of the material whereas Library Search is linked to the CCCU journal subscriptions. Run a quick search in Library Search to find full-text journal articles to read online. Try searching for a key word or phrase connected with your research topic e.g. “sensational fiction”. See our quick guide for more information.

JSTOR is also a popular journal database which provides access to past issues of journals. You can also search a subset of English language and literature content on JSTOR.

Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals includes journals such as the Journal of Early Modern Studies. Open access journals are often scholarly, but the difference is, they believe in making their research accessible to all who have an internet connection. Here are some that you might find useful:

• Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830
  
  
• Early Modern Literary Studies
  
  
• Victorian Popular Fictions Journal

You can find the following newspaper collections via the Find databases A to Z link on LibrarySearch. Remember to log in to Library Search with your computing username and password to gain full access:

British Periodicals – periodical press, strong on popular culture and political satire.

Europeana Newspaper Collection – historic newspapers from across Europe.

Gale Primary Sources includes the 17th and 18th century Burney collection, 19th century British library newspapers,19th century UK periodical collection and The Times Digital Archive 1785-2013.

Google Newspaper Archive

Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842-2003

LexisLibrary Newspapers (UK) – 1982 to current.

UK Press Online – 1930-40 Fascist Press Archive

Use the specialist databases via the Find databases link in LibrarySearch for a more advanced search of the academic literature available to you.

The following are key databases for your subject.

• AM Explorer - Children's Literature and Culture, Eighteenth Century Drama, Eighteenth Century Journals, Literary Manuscripts, Literary Print Culture, Medieval Travel Writing, Nineteenth Century Literary Society, Perdita Manuscripts 1500-1700, Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape, Shakespeare in Performance, Shakespeare's Globe Archive, Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History.
  
  
• Cambridge Core - multidisciplinary books, book chapters and journal articles from CUP.
  
  
• Digital Theatre Plus – Plays and production, theory and criticism.
  
  
• Drama Online – digital library of playtexts, filmed live performances, audio plays, theory and practice.
  
  
• International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance - Full text articles on theatre, drama, film, etc.
  
  
• JSTOR A full-text archive of core scholarly journals, dating from the first issue up until two to five years ago. Subject coverage includes Arts and Sciences, with over 290 journal titles relevant to Language and Literature.
  
  
• Literary Encyclopedia - The Literary Encyclopedia is a reference work for English, American, German, Russian, Italian, French and Classical Latin literature as well as expanding coverage of Hispanic, Japanese, Classical Greek, Canadian, East European and various postcolonial literature. It is collectively owned by its writers and editors and combines advanced database technology with an understanding of literary history.
  
  
• National Theatre Black Plays Archive - The aim of the Black Plays Archive is to document the first professional production of every play by black British, African and Caribbean writers in the UK. The Black Plays Archive does not include performance poetry and art, readings, revues, cabaret, recitations, sketches or puppet shows. The project focuses solely on the premieres of these plays and as a result does not provide information for all subsequent productions.
  
  
• Periodicals Archive Online Backfiles of journals; includes the Byron Journal, Dickens Quarterly, Explicator, Journal of Modern Literature, The Literary Review, Literature and History, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Modern Fiction Studies, Shakespeare Studies, Studies in English Literature, Studies in Romanticism, Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, The Wordsworth Circle, Yearbook of English Studies and many more.
  
  
• Project Muse An online database which provides full-text access to high quality journals from scholarly publishers.

Please note you will be able to access the full text of many of the articles you find when searching the databases but will not be able to read the full text of all the results you find. If you need a journal article that the university doesn’t subscribe to, try document delivery. 

There are a lot of brilliant websites that may be relevant to your studies, but there are also many that are not, so it is essential to evaluate the material carefully to decide whether they are scholarly enough. Here are some recommended sites:

• British Library Theatrical Playbills - includes playbills digitised from over 500 physical volumes of theatrical English, Scottish, and Irish playbills between 1600 and 1902 (mostly 19th century).
  
  
• Camelot Project - Scholarly Arthurian resources.  Published by the University of Rochester, New York.
  
  
• Caxton’s Chaucer – digitized copies of the 1476 and 1483 editions of The Canterbury Tales.
  
  
• CLiC Dickens Project – a corpus linguistics project.
  
  
• DEEP – Database of Early English Playbooks published in England, Scotland and Ireland from the beginning of printing through to 1660
  
  
• Dickens Journal Online - Dickens's weekly magazines Household Words and All the Year Round.
  
  
• DickensLand – part of the CCCU Kent digital map project, explore Kent as Dickens knew it.
  
  
• Discovering Literature – Discovering Literature brings to life the social, political and cultural context in which key works of literature were written. Enjoy digitised treasures from the British Library collection, newly commissioned articles, short documentary films and teachers’ notes.
  
  
• Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership – 25,000 texts. Includes works by Erasmus, Shakespeare, King James I, Marlowe, Galileo, Caxton, Chaucer, Malory, Boyle, Newton, Locke, More, Milton, Spenser, Bacon, Donne, Hobbes, Purcell, Behn, and Defoe.
  
  
• Eighteenth Century Collection Online Hosted at the Internet Archive. A great selection of 18th century plays, books and other material.
  
  
• Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive – George Crabbe, Elizabeth Carter, William Cowper, Henry Fielding, Fulke Greville and many more.
  
  
• English Broadside Ballad Archive – Hosted by the University of California. Nearly 8,000 ballads.
  
  
• Evans Early American Imprint Collection Text Creation Partnership – 4,977 early American texts.
  
  
• Florence Boos’ Study Questions for British Literature
  
  
• Kent Maps Online - Many famous authors lived in Kent or wrote about the county. Kent Maps Online seeks to highlight their responses to the landscapes they inhabit  - chalk downs, coastal towns and cathedral cities. 
• Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters – includes information about the manuscript holdings of British and Irish repositories of all sizes, from the British Library to small-town museums, and about literary authors of all genres, from major poets to minor science fiction writers and romantic novelists.
  
  
• Luminarium – 16th century Renaissance English Literature.
  
  
• Project Reveal – Manuscript collection of English and American authors held at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Includes the diaries and letters of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Lear, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and William Makepeace Thackeray as well as many others.
  
  
• REED Online – Search the surviving records of drama, secular music, and other popular entertainment in England from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres.
  
  
• Sonnet Central – a comprehensive and searchable archive of English sonnets, with pictures, commentary and relevant web links.
  
  
• Victorian Research Web: Scholarly Resources for Victorian Research – a useful collection of links to aid researchers. Provides information about libraries and archives, journals and organizations, courses and online projects.
  
  
• Victorian Web – all things Victorian.
  
  
• WoolfNotes - What did Virginia Woolf read?

The Library has special collections and archival material that will be of interest to English Literature students. You must make an appointment to view these by asking at the Library Point.

Children’s Historical Fiction Collection – Includes works by authors such as Arthur O. Cooke, G.A. Henty, George MacDonald, Captain Frederick Marryat and Charlotte Yonge. Tales of adventure, fantasy and daring derring-dos.

Elizabeth Gaskell Collection – A collection of works by Elizabeth Gaskell and literary criticism about her work.

Jocelyn Brooke - Queer poet, naturalist and literary critic who write several semi-autobiographical novels based on his life in Kent.

Mary Braddon Archive – Letters, diaries and personal effects of the Victorian sensational novelist, as well as works by her son W.B. Maxwell.

Sarah Grand Collection – A suitcase full of Sarah Grand’s letters and personalia.

Bessie Marchant - Author of adventure novels for children. She published approx. 150 books from 1892-1941.

John Strange Winter (Henrietta Vaughan Stannard) - novels, periodicals and letters

Hesba Stretton - novels and biographical information