Clark Family Library: English Literature: Find Texts

Texts vs. Books

Why are these resources on this page instead of the Find Books/eBooks page? Texts are books, right? Well, in many cases, yes, the texts that are the focus of your research are books, but they can also be plays, short stories, or poems. This page is dedicated to helping you find online versions of those works. You can use the same tools on the Find Books/eBooks page (the GeoTom search and call numbers) to find physical copies of texts as you would other books for your research.

Resources for Finding Texts

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
HathiTrust digital library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

New Play Exchange This link opens in a new window
Search the world's largest digital library of scripts by living authors. Read and download scripts, see writer profiles, and read professional recommendations.
NOTE: This database is only accessible from on the campus network.

A Celebration of Women Writers
The goal of A Celebration of Women Writers is to comprehensively list online editions of works by women writers, and resources about women writers, which are freely readable online.Edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom.
Voices From the Gaps
This site provides teaching and research tools for accessing a global community of women writers of color living and dead, obscure and renowned.

Women Writers Project This link opens in a new window
Search or browse a growing list of rare or lesser known English texts by women authors published between 1526 and 1850.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection This link opens in a new window
Contains searchable full-text English, German and French literature titles from the Castle Corvey Collection. An important archive of Romantic era writing and includes fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry and more. Use the drop-down menu to select the database you want to search. Gale.

NINES
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.
Early English Books Online
EEBO-TCP is a partnership with ProQuest and with more than 150 libraries to generate highly accurate, fully-searchable, encoded texts corresponding to books from the Early English Books Online Database.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 53,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - MIT
An open access copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This is for supplemental use only; it doesn't replace your critical editions requested by your professors for class because it is lacking any notes or other helpful critical material.

Finding Poetry

We have a sizable poetry collection in the stacks and online. You can use the subject term "Poetry" to help you focus your search in Discovery for them. However, below is a list of other online resources to find poetry.

Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.
Poetry Center Digital Archive
Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives collection, supplemented by select archival texts and images.
Representative Poetry Online
Representative Poetry Online includes 4,700 English poems by 723 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto. Includes full-text of poems and poet biographies.
Poet's Corner
Poet's Corner is an online library of over 7,300 works by about 800 poets. Established in 1994, "[t]he goal of this project is to maintain a user-friendly library that is both a useful reference and an appealing place to browse and explore[...]"
Poem Hunter
Poem Hunter is one of the largest online repository of poems, with over 2 million poems. It also doubles as a social network for fans of poetry.