English Databases
ACLS Humanities E-Book
Search here for e-books by keyword or author. You can also browse by title, author, or subject.
Humanities International Index
Humanities International Index provides citations and abstracts to articles, essays, reviews, and other reference sources in the humanities.
JSTOR
JSTOR is a multidisciplinary archive of scholarly works. It is a good database for researchers of art history, history, literature, and religious studies.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Global: The Humanities and Social Sciences Collection
This is the premiere database for full-text access to dissertations and theses for humanities, social sciences, education, religion, and business.
English Reference e-Books
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
Covering Literary Theory from 1900 to 1966, Literary Theory from 1966 to the present, and Cultural Theory, this encyclopedia provides accessible entries on the important concepts, theorists, and trends in post-1900 literary and cultural theory with explanations of complex terms and important theoretical concepts, and summaries of the work and ideas of key figures.
The Encyclopedia of the Novel
Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world, formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator), technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure, and style), subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel, theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel, book history, and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction
Presents the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Entries cover major writers and their works; the genres and sub-genres of fiction; and the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field.
English Websites
Online Resources for Writers
Online Resources for Writers, from Amherst College, provides links to websites and essays about the structure and form of writing. Resources that are only available to Amherst students are few and noted.
Outline of American Literature
This government publication, offered here as a free PDF, gives broad overviews of the different periods and movements in the American literary tradition.
The Rossetti Archives: The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Rossetti Archives provides biographical information and a life chronology of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as providing the full text of all of his writings for free online. Related texts, contemporary studies, and visual works are also provided.
The Walt Whitman Archive
The Walt Whitman Archive, housed at the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, provides the full text of every edition of Leaves of Grass published in Walt Whitman’s lifetime, in addition to poems published in periodicals, manuscripts, biographies, and letters. Contemporary reviews and bibliographies of Whitman's criticism and scholarship from 1975 to the present are also available.
WordNet: A Lexical Database for the English Language
WordNet is a dictionary/thesaurus for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Words are grouped into synsets, or by their synonymous definitions. This makes the synonym results and example sentences you retrieve from a search more meaningful and more likely to sound natural when written or spoken.