Research Guides: English: Home

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Welcome to the Purdue LibGuide for English! Here you will find databases and resources on the wide variety of subjects taught by the Purdue English Department. These resources are sorted into the following general categories:

Medieval & Early Modern
Transatlantic & Early Atlantic
20th & 21st Century
Gender, Ethnicity, & Culture
Drama
Language

There is also a listing of general-use databases here on this page (just to the right of the tab you're reading now), which can point you to databases that are useful in most or all of the above areas. If you are exclusively looking for primary sources, you will see that has its own category in the menu on the left, where we have collected relevant databases that focus on primary sources. (Note also that humanity's rich and varied cultural experience resists being divided into cleanly-delineated categories, so there is some overlap between our different sections.)

Each category contains a listing of resources relevant to that particular subject, including databases available through the Purdue Libraries and archival materials held by Archives & Special Collections. You can explore these resources to augment your research, brainstorm new research topics, or just out of curiosity.

ACLS Humanities E-Book
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) History E-Book (HEB) Project provides searchable full-text of over 800 books in several fields of history. These are frequently cited works of major importance to historical studies.
British Literary Manuscripts Online This link opens in a new window
Contains facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials dating from roughly 1120-1900. Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript (note: the text of the manuscripts is not full-text searchable).
Cairn French Studies Bouquet This link opens in a new window
Cairn.info (French Studies Bouquet) This collection of 127 French and Belgian journals covers the arts, history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, political science, sociology and culture. Coverage: Varies; 2001 – current.
Children's Core Collection
Containing over 13,000 titles, this rich resource covers fiction and nonfiction works, story collections, picture books and magazines recommended for readers in preschool through sixth grade. Professional literature for the children's librarian—both periodicals and books—is also covered.

Selected and recommended by specialists in library service to children, listed books within Children’s Core Collection encompass a wide variety of topics, including a new abundance of books on technology, social sciences and sciences.
Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
Reliable one search access to information, awards, honors and published reviews about Pre K-12 books and media, including reading measurement programs (Lexile, AR, Scholastic Reading Counts), curriculum tools such as lesson plans, teaching guides, discussion guides, and links to web pages featuring children's authors and illustrators reviews.

Note: Works best with Firefox or Google Chrome
Children's Literature Review
Excerpts from reviews, criticism, and commentary on books for children and young people. Covers over 600 writers and illustrators. Publication began in 1976.

COVE Studio Purdue
Containing over 17 million words of content, this database allows you to create anthologies of literature and to annotate collectively with students.

Essay and General Literature Index
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Indexes essays and chapters in anthologies, and multi-author collections. Coverage spans the entire range of the humanities and social sciences, from economics, political science, and history to criticism of literary works, art history, drama, and film.
Gale Literature
Gale Literature is an integrated research environment that allows users to search across the content of several Gale databases: Gale eBooks; Gale Literature Criticism: Children's Literature Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism; Gale Literature Resource Center; Something About the Author; Something about the Author Autobiography Series. Full-text articles from scholarly journals and literary magazines are combined with critical essays, work and topic overviews, book reviews, biographies, and more to provide a wealth of information on authors, their works, and literary movements.
Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective
Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective™: 1907-1984 offers a broad range of subject coverage in the humanities and social sciences with high-quality indexing of more than 1,300,000 articles in nearly 1,100 periodicals, dating as far back as 1907, as well as citations of over 240,000 book reviews.
Search this resource with Humanities Full Text for coverage up to the present
Humanities Full Text
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Humanities Full Text™ provides coverage of feature articles, interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, and original works of fiction, drama, poetry and book reviews, as well as reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, radio and television programs, plays, operas, and more.
Humanities International Complete
Humanities International Complete is an essential collection for comprehensive coverage of the humanities with full text content.
JSTOR
Full-text digital archive of over 2600 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.
JSTOR Understanding Series This link opens in a new window
A research tool that connects primary texts with journal articles and book chapters on JSTOR that cite those texts--quickly navigating to scholarship, line by line. Building on a previous project, Understanding Shakespeare, the Understanding series expands the scope of the tool to include ten key works of British literature, the King James Bible, and all Shakespeare plays and sonnets.
Literary Reference Center Plus This link opens in a new window
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A full-text database providing information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes.
MagillOnLiterature Plus This link opens in a new window
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A source for editorially reviewed critical analyses, character studies, author biographies and plot summaries of the most studied literary works.
MLA Directory of Periodicals
The MLA Directory of Periodicals contains all information available on the journals and series on the bibliography's Master List of Periodicals. Over 7,100 titles are included; of these, over 4,400 are currently indexed. The entries list editorial addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, frequency of publication, descriptions of the periodicals' scopes, circulation figures, subscription prices and addresses, advertising information, and submission guidelines. The directory also provides statistics on how many articles and book reviews the periodicals publish each year, as well as how many are submitted.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
This database is a classified listing and subject index of scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literatures, folklore and linguistics which has been compiled by the Modern Language Association of America since 1926. The electronic version includes the Bibliography's entire print run and currently contains more than 2 million records.
Short Story Index This link opens in a new window
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Contains information on short stories by author or genre, and provides detailed indexing for more than 117,000 stories from more than 4,200 collections and anthologies. Short Story Index is searchable by author, title, subject, keyword, date, literary technique and source alone or by any combination. This reference database grows by 4,000 records each year, and includes coverage dating back to 1984.

ArchiveGrid
Descriptions of archival holdings and special collections of manuscripts and other primary source materials nationwide. Includes full text finding aids describing the contents of archival collections at various libraries, museums, and archival repositories throughout the U.S. with links to the repositories.
HathiTrust
A growing collection of several million scanned books, journals, and other digital resources, comparable to Google Books. Benefits include full-text and advanced bibliographic search capabilities, and full PDF downloading of works in the public domain (26% of the collection).
HathiTrust is a partnership of more than 50 major research libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. It ingests digital content from its partner institutions as well as from Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft. In some cases, books that are only available in snippet view through Google Books are full text at HathiTrust, which is actively investigating the copyright status of works published up to 1964. Hathi (pronounced HAH-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, a symbol of memory, wisdom, and strength.
JSTOR Understanding Series This link opens in a new window
A research tool that connects primary texts with journal articles and book chapters on JSTOR that cite those texts--quickly navigating to scholarship, line by line. Building on a previous project, Understanding Shakespeare, the Understanding series expands the scope of the tool to include ten key works of British literature, the King James Bible, and all Shakespeare plays and sonnets.

Digital Bodleian
A wide range of collections of digitized manuscripts, rare printed books, and other material, provided by the Bodleian Library.
Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
Directory of Open Access Books
A searchable database of peer-reviewed scientific monographs that have been made accessible by academic publishers in open access. DOAB was established by OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) Foundation.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Provides access to a global variety of scholarly open access journals in multiple subjects.
English Language and Literature Commons
The Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, this dynamic research tool includes peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Huntington Digital Library -- Manuscripts
A selection from the Huntington’s millions of manuscript items on a range of topics related to the history and culture of America and the British Isles, as well as the history of science, medicine, and technology, dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Includes the Ellesmere Chaucer.
Huntington Digital Library -- Printed Books
The Printed Books digital collection contains images of selected unique or significant items in the Huntington Library. Most were digitized in programs targeting certain discrete genres of material. Strengths include the quarto editions of plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the illuminated books of William Blake, and English broadside ballads.
Internet Archive
Free books and texts. The "Text Archive" contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historial texts, and academic books.
Morgan Library Digital Facsimiles
A collection of digital facsimiles of manuscripts, photographs, and other artistic and/or literary material, hosted by the Morgan Library.
Newberry Library Digital Collections
Digital collections of the Newberry Library. Collections do not have their own individual pages, but you can access specific collections, categories, etc. through the "Browse All" option.
Project Gutenberg
Free public domain downloads. Multiple languages and subjects. File formats vary by title but include: PDF, EPUB, MOBI, GIF, etc.
Walters Ex Libris
Here you can explore digitized manuscripts, bindings, and single leaves from the collection of the Walters Art Museum. Located in Baltimore, Maryland, the Walters Art Museum houses a collection of more than 900 manuscripts from Europe, Byzantium, North Africa, South Asia, Ethiopia, and more. The Walters' digitization initiative is ongoing, and roughly a third of the collection has been digitized to date.