Henry Buhl Library: E-Books & Online Books: Literature

Literature eBooks & Online Books

eBooks
Online Books Freely Available

Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world --- with its beginnings over 150 years ago.

Oxford Reference Online Database -- Literature
Access to a collection of online dictionaries and encyclopedias related to literature.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online (Gale Literature)
Signed essays written by scholars provide essential context for understanding the careers and writings of more than 12,000 authors from all time periods and from all parts of the world.
Scribner Writer Series (Gale Literature)
Contains original and detailed bio-critical essays on the lives and works of important authors from around the world.

Includes full-text of American Writers, British Writers, World Poets, and more.
Twayne's Authors Series (Gale Literature)
Author-focused volumes of literary criticism offering in-depth introductions to the lives and works of writers, the history and influence of literary movements and to the development of literary genres. (Gale Literature)

American Poets and Poetry: From the Colonial Era to the Present
This encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, and includes entries on hundreds of poets of the American canon.

Bloom's Literary Criticism e-books (Infobase)
Collection of e-books from Professor Harold Bloom. Series includes Modern Critical Interpretations, Bloom's Guides, Bloom's Major Poets, Bloom's Modern Critical Views, and Bloom's Major Dramatists and more!
Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics
This "collection offers over 2000 comprehensive and accessible essays on major authors, periods and genres, written by experts and designed for student readers."
EBSCO eBook Collection
Access to over 200,000 full text eBooks across a variety of subjects.

The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789
Provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the poetry, drama, fiction, and literary and cultural criticism produced from the Restoration of the English monarchy to the onset of the French Revolution.
The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature
Presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries.
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory provides a highly informative reference work in this multidisciplinary field. The entries provide explanations of complex terms and important theoretical concepts, as well as summaries of the work and ideas of key figures.
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies brings together the most wide-ranging and up-to-date scholarship ever assembled on the colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial condition, covering the period from 1492 to the present.
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction.
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic
The Encylopedia of the Gothic features a series of newly-commissioned essays from experts in Gothic studies that cover all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture.
The Encyclopedia of the Novel
The Encyclopedia of the Novel provides authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, genre, and theory of the novel.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction
This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language.
The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature
Spans the full sweep of literary genres and figures that define this influential period, combining accessibility with an unmatched breadth of coverage and authoritative scholarship.

Loeb Classical Library
The Loeb Classical Library® is the only series of books which, through original text and English translation, gives access to all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.
This is the digital version of all Loeb volumes, searchable by author, subject, or series number. New volumes are added when published.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (OEBART) is an in-depth, comprehensive reference work that covers the cultural history of biblical texts, themes, characters, images, and the Bible itself in the literary, visual, and musical arts.
Oxford Literature Handbooks Online
Access over 900 articles using this collection of e-books from Oxford University Press. The titles in this collection cover literary periods, genres, and authors (i.e. John Donne, Shakespeare, and Percy Bysshe Shelley).

Cambridge Histories Online
Includes 14 subject areas: General History, Regional History, Literary Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Music History, Economic History and more.
Salem Literature Online
Contains "the Critical Insights" series, which focuses on an individual author’s entire body of work or on a single work of literature.

American Literature:

Norton Anthology to American Literature
American Verse Project
"The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920." African-American and women's poetry are included in the collection.
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
"A digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. From The Schomburg Center (NYPL).
Wright American Fiction
"This is a collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2,887 volumes included (1,763 unedited, 1,124 fully edited and encoded) by 1,456 authors." The works included are browsable by author and links are provided to full-text versions of the text, when available (from Indiana University Digital Library Program).
The Walt Whitman Archive
"an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. It is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa)."

British Literature:

Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery
"The uniqueness of this one lies in its fully online format and its emphasis on spoken performance. Part of the University of Wisconsin's Digital Collections, and adhering to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative, this is a serious scholarly enterprise."
Complete Works of William Shakespeare--the Plays
Searchable database of Shakespeare's plays. Titles arranged in categories of Comedy, History, Tragedy, and Poetry. Also includes Shakespearean quotes from Bartlett's Quotations.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
"The heart of this site is the (keyed in) full texts of all Shakespeare's sonnets from Thomas Thorpe's 1609 edition. But the site also provides commentary on the sonnets" ... and more.
Victorian Women Writers Project
Works by British women writers of the 19th century.

General Literature:

University of Virginia's E-Book Library (VIRGO)
1,800 publicly-available e-books including classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, the Bible, Shakespeare, American history, African-American documents, and much more.
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
According to the website, "the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is collection of full text content designed to facilitate and support a person's ongoing liberal arts education by providing the means to access, read, and analyze sets of digitized books, journal articles loosly surrounding the topics of American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy."

Works on this site include titles by Aristotle, Jane Austen, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, William Makepeace Thackeray, and many others.
Bartleby.com
Bartleby.com publishes thousands of free online classics of reference, literature and nonfiction.
Humanities Text initiative: Modern English Collection
Provides search and browse features for a collection of modern English texts (from University of Michigan).
A Celebration of Women Writers
Provides links to biographies and bibliographies of women writers.