Four noteworthy General Sites
Representative Poetry On-line
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/indexpoet.html
This large site
has poems by most English, American, and Canadian poets, most of them with
useful notes. The texts are reliable and include line numbers.
Luminarium
http://www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm
"Luminarium"
has been created by Anniina Jokinen. As she notes, "the site is
not affiliated with any institution, is sponsored by no-one, nor does it generate
any profit." It was first created in 1996 "to provide a starting
point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature." The site includes Medieval, Renaissance
and 17th century texts based on the versions from The Norton
Anthology.
In addition to texts, the site includes links to articles, and information
about the authors and their times. The site itself is both a model of organization
and a visual delight.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
One of the richest
Internet sites, Perseus' main focus is on the classics. It includes texts
in English of most Roman and Greek Plays. It also contains etexts for Shakespeare
and Marlowe among other Elizabethans. The Shakespeare edition is edited by
W.G. Clark (Oxford circa 1900) and has line numbers. There is also selected
supplementary material on Shakespeare.
Renascence Editions
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/ren.htm
"An Online
Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799",
this site has been "published" by Richard bear since 1994.
It includes a considerable number of obscure
and not so obscure texts, a few of which have glossaries. Considerable effort
has been made to make the texts, including the orthography, as close as technologically
possible to the original.
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Outstanding Sites of Poets or Poems
Chaucer
http://icg.harvard.edu/~chaucer/
The Geoffrey
Chaucer Website homepage. The site is
"This site
provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program."
In addition to glossed Chaucer texts, it provides extensive material from
works relevant to Chaucer, critical articles, interlinear translations to
some of "The Canterbury Tales", pronunciation help and much more.
"At the moment the site concentrates on the Canterbury Tales, but the
longer-term goal is to create a more general Chaucer page." On top of
everything, the site is visually terrific.
Spenser,
The Shepherd's Calender. http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/januarye.html#clownish
This Renascence
edition text is Richard Bear's hyperlinked version of the poem with notes.
Milton
http://www.dartmouth.edu/research/milton/reading_room/contents/index.shtml
A remarkable
site made by Dartmouth professor Thomas Luxon and his students. The site features
hyperlinked texts and much more. The site was established in 1997. It contains most of Milton's major poetry in English and some
of his prose, much of it annotated. Luxon's goal is to "present fully
annotated and hyperlinked versions of all of Milton's English works."
Pope,
The Rape of the Lock
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~sconstan/
S. Constantine
created this site, which includes just about everything you ever wanted to
know about the poem, to which the entire site is dedicated.
Blake,
several of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, in facsimile, with
text and analysis.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/blakeinteractive/works/songs_intro.html
This
section of the Tate gallery "showcases a selection of the Songs of
Innocence and of Experience in their original illustrated form, but with pop-up notes and audio-features
added." It is worth visiting for the illustrations alone. These are measurably
better than any other Blake 'reproductions" I have seen on the Internet.
Wordsworth
and Coleridge, The Lyrical Ballads
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/
A scholar's paradise, "this edition reproduces full texts of five editions
or states of The Lyrical Ballads." It includes a bibliography
(some of the articles are on line) and a fascinating way of presenting the
material so various editions of individual poems may be compared. This is
an excellent example of the use of technology to present material in a unique
and illuminating way.
Coleridge.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/index.html
If you like Coleridge,
you will love this site. Created by Marjorie A. Tiefert and maintained by
the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, the Samuel
Taylor Coleridge Archive includes hyperlinked texts of his poems as well as
excerpts from his letters, his literary theory and criticism, his political
commentary and journalism and his thoughts on just about everything. The site
also includes a time line on his life and his world some trivia recommended
reading and a critical
essay on STC's conversation poems.
Browning
http://faculty.stonehill.edu/geverett/rb/rb.htm
Hyperlinked texts
of many Browning poems and a few by his contemporaries. These versions
of the poems were created by Glenn Everett and students (at the University
of Tennessee at Martin). The notes are plentiful and useful.
The Browning
Multimedia Page
http://faculty.stonehill.edu/geverett/rb/rb.htm
This page
includes hypertext versions of eight Browning poems including "The Bishop
Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church" , "Fra Lippo Lippi"
and "Andrea del Sarto" . The latter two pages include some excellent
illustrations of works by the respective painters. There are also links to
eight other poems by contemporaries of Browning. The pages were created by
Glenn Everett and some of his students at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
Whitman
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/whitman/
is The URL for the Walt Whitman
Archive. Almost anything relating to Whitman's writings, from manuscript
to numerous editions of Leaves of Grass, is available at this superb site.
Related materials include a biography and a chronology, some criticism, including
80 entries from the Walt Whitman Encyclopedia, bibliographic material, images
of Whitman from various decades, and even what is reputed to be a recording
of Whitman reading four lines from "America." The sight also connects
to the "Classroom
Electric" (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/fdw/)
which describes itself as "a constellation of web sites on Emily Dickinson,
Walt Whitman, and nineteenth-century American culture [where] users can explore
images of original manuscripts, rare photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, letters,
and maps in sites informed by cutting-edge scholarship."
Eliot,
The Waste Land, http://world.std.com/%7Eraparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html
"Exploring
"The Waste Land: takes a while to load, but it an amazing site
with textual notes, Eliot's notes, and editor Rickard A. Paker's explanations.
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Shakespeare
The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/
The
"original" Shakespeare etext site. It seems somewhat forlorn, sporting
an announcement that its search feature will be restored in the fall of 2000.
No line numbers.
Shakespeare
by Individual Studies.
http://www.engl.uvic.ca/Faculty/MBHomePage/ISShakespeare/Texts.html
"The
public domain texts that are available here are the same as others available
on the standard Shakespeare net text. The difference is that these have line
numbers attached, and the lines have been adjusted so that they are the same
as in the Signet Classic Shakespeare. This is the correct URL as of April
8th. The URL given by Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet
(http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/default.htm),
as well as the link on the uvic site homepage to the texts, was not working
on 4/8/03.
In
addition the following general sites have Shakespeare texts.
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Fiction
Jonathan
Swift, Gulliver's Travels
http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/
Compiled by Lee Jaffe, Head, Library Computing & Network Services University
of California, Santa Cruz, this is a fully annotated version of the text with
supplementary material as well. Includes bibliography, links, and illustrations
for original edition.
Dickens
This "multimedia"
version of Dickens text includes links to helpful notes, Lynch's illustrations
and some appropriate music as well. It also numbers the paragraphs in each
"stave."
Lewis
Carroll
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/rgs/alice-table.html
Project Gutenberg's Alice in Wonderland with original illustrations.
http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Carroll/Alice/Under/
Alice's Adventures Underground, also with original illustrations
Mark
Twain
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html
Mark Twain in His Times. An excellent site the purpose of which is
"to focus on how "Mark Twain" and his works were created and
defined, marketed and performed, reviewed and appreciated. The goal is to
allow readers, scholars, students and teachers to see what Mark Twain and
His Times said about each other, in a way that can speak to us today."
Includes "dozens of texts and manuscripts, scores of contemporary reviews
and articles, hundreds of images, and many different kinds of interactive
exhibits." The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn includes hyperlinks
to the original illustrations.
Children's
Literature
Full-Text Fairy Tales
http://kidsnewsroom.org/elmer/infocentral/stories/grimm/index.html
Web page or Text download options
Full-Text Famous Books
http://kidsnewsroom.org/elmer/infocentral/stories/index.html
a limited selection of novels in .txt format - the advantage is that the format
is easily understood by younger children
Online Children's
Stories - http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html
Brother's
Grimm and other Fairy Tales - gopher://ftp.std.com:70/11/obi/book/Fairy.Tales/Grimm
- direct link to .ftp store of text files
International Children's Digital Library
- http://www.icdlbooks.org/ - ongoing
collection of international children's literature - full text - in the original
language
Internet Classics Archive
- http://classics.mit.edu/index.html
- alas, a server collapse has hurt this site, but you can still find out of
copyright classics online
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus Tales
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/remus/remus.html
This website focus on the Uncle Remus Tales offering the texts and a separate
analysis of many of them with the goal of "placing them in a historical
context." It includes "observations about post-Civil War black culture,
and Southern society in general" and uses "the stories and the reactions
they engendered as points of reference."
Tales
of Wonder - folk and fairy tales from around the world
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NonFiction
and Essays - see also
Primary Documents
Samuel
Johnson
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/
Jack Lynch's Johnson pages include links to etexts (Only the poem "London"
in an annotated version) including many of his essays and many essays on Johnson
as well as extensive bibliographic information. An excellent portal into the
18th century.
Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele
http://www.english.vt.edu/~drad/Courses/ENGL3034/AddisonSteele/AddisonFrameset-1.html
The first ten essays from the Spectator Papers include nice pop-up
annotations for each of the essays. Part of a course on Restoration and 18th
Century Literature dated 2002 that contains some other e-texts but may not
be around forever.
Thoreau
http://eserver.org/thoreau/thoreau.html
This site contains may of the works of Thoreau with annotations as well as
detailed bibliographic material, a chronology, and several essays on Thoreau.
It also has links to other Thoreau sites.
The
Three Best Sites with Contemporary Poems
American Academy
of Poets
http://www.poets.org/
This site has
poems that are still under copyright as well as many that are not. Probably
the most comprehensive source of good, contemporary poetry. Has supplementary
material and audio as well as a feature that allows
"visitors to create their own anthologies of content from our site."
The Internet
Poetry Archive
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/
The
"Archive" features selected poems by major contemporary poets (Heaney,
Levine, Pinsky etc). It is sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press
and the UNC Office of Information
Technology and it includes audio clips of the poets' readings and some commentary
as well.
Poetry
180
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
This site
is "designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem each
day of the 180 days of the school year." The poems, chosen by our current
Poet Laureate Billy Collins, were all written in the last forty years, and
many in the last five. They are meant to be listened to. The poems themselves
are accessible and seem to share a kind of off-beat liveliness. Many are witty,
some moving, and a few will raise the eyebrow of a principal or two.
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Other Worthwhile Poetry Sites
A Small Anthology
of Poems
http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/index.html#A1.0
The
anthology is not that small and links to a collection of bad poems also compiled
by Seamus Cooney (Western Michigan U)
Modern &
Contemporary American Poetry
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/home.html#g
A
complex site (some dead links) at the University of Pennsylvania with a small
selection of poems from numerous poets with considerable secondary material.
Poetry and Prose of the
Harlem Renaissance
http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/poetryindex.html
A site that has
some supplementary material on the Harlem Renaissance and a resource guide
to 10 women poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
Poem of the Week
http://www.potw.org/
This site, as
it implies, provides a new poem each week with easy access to past poems.
Poems of the week have included "Dover Beach", all the verses of
"The Star Spangled Banner", and "The Road Not Taken",
as well as other, more obscure, selections.
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Archives
African-American
Writers : Online E-texts - from a variety of sources
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm
Alex
Catalogue of Electronic texts
http://www.infomotions.com/alex/
"
A collection of digital documents collected in the subject areas of English
literature, American literature, and Western philosophy" maintained by
Eric Lease Morgan, the site has a number of interesting features. Individual
and multiple texts can be searched. A concordance can be built and searched.
Texts can be downloaded as PDF files in fonts of your own choosing. The site
includes numerous texts by over 120 authors.
The American Verse Project
http://www.hti.umich.edu/a/amverse/
The
Humanities Text Initiative American
Verse Project is a
vast collection of American poetry in the public domain. The texts are searchable
in a number of ways after they are "added" to your "bookbag."
Eighteenth Century e-texts
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/etext.html
18th
century electronic texts with updated links and appropriate comments. This
site, compiled by Jack Lynch, an Internet pioneer since his graduate school
days, is an excellent site for any information on the 18th century.
The
eserver. aka The English server
http://eserver.org/
This
was originally (1990) hosted at Carnegie Mellon and has moved to the Iowa
State University. It is sprawling and inclusive, a repository that seems somewhat
dated in some ways. It does include a moden poetry section, drama, and topical
collection. Criticism is well represented.
Full-Text
African-American Literature
http://kidsnewsroom.org/elmer/infocentral/stories/afrolit/ebooks.htm
Contains
primary source documents, fiction and essays, suitable for Middle School.
IPL Online
Texts Collection
http://www.ipl.org/div/books/
(Internet
Public Library)
"The
IPL Online Texts Collection contains over 20,000 titles that can be browsed
by author, by title, or by Dewey Subject Classification." When you find
a text it links you to a site where the texts is available.
Internet
Classics Archive - http://classics.mit.edu/index.html
- alas, a server collapse has hurt this site, but you can still find out of
copyright classics online
The Oxford Text Archive
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
An archive of
2500 classic texts in 25 languages. Somewhat intimidating (at least to me)
to negotiate. The texts are searchable.
Project Gutenberg
http://promo.net/pg/
The official homepage of the oldest producer of etexts.
This source of over 6000 etexts was the brainchild of Michael Hart who envisioned
it thirty years ago. Although the patient and determined can use the sites
search engine. The texts themselves are 'dispersed" and it is easies
to access the texts through a general search engine, or through a portal like
"The Reading Room" at the University of Maryland. The texts themselves
are "bareboned."
"The Reading Room" at the University of Maryland.
http://www.lib.umd.edu/ETC/ReadingRoom/
This
is a first rate, comprehensive site that seems to be extremely well organized
and fast. It provides easy access to Project Gutenberg materials.
http://www.rc.umd.edu/
An interesting website "devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature
and culture". The website includes some interesting electronic editions
(see the description of The Lyrical Ballads above) as well as scholarly
resources. It also links to the Romantic Circles High School, "an online
educational network built by and for a national community of teachers and
students." The "High School" includes a few units on specific
poems, but at this point at time (March 7, 2004) seems a work in progress.
University of Virginia Electronic Text Library
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/
The
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia is the source of many quality
etexts, some of which are available only to University of Virginia students. Their Shakespeare includes first folio
facsimiles among others. The Modern English Collection is part of the
Library as is British Poetry 1780-1910.
Victorian Women Writer's Project
http://www.indiana.edu/cgi-bin-ip/letrs/vwwplib.pl
There
is much here that is difficult to obtain in print. The writers are all British
but do not (see Isabella Bird) always write about Britain.
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Noteworthy
Commercial Sites
Project
Bartleby
http://www.bartleby.com/
Large
commercial site with some excellent text, but with commercial irritations.
The Shakespeare, which uses the Oxford Edition of 1914 edited by W.J. Craig,
has line numbers and a good search tool.
BIBLIOMANIA
http://www.bibliomania.com/
Extensive collection
of online texts; author, title, and subject
indexes; lives
of the poets; faces of the poets; bookshelf
Poetry, drama,
fiction, nonfiction. Includes the standard etext Shakespeare with a search
tool. Also includes advertising.
LitFinder
- http://www.poemfinder.com/ - from
Roth Publishing - for a fee, schools (generally through the library - a password
protected link is created on the web server) can access Poem Finder, Story
Finder, Essay/Speech/Play Finder databases - include full text, biographies,
short critical essays - searchable by title, author, theme, genre, and more
ways - free trial is available. Most material is copyrighted, so use for education
is restricted by Fair Use as well as Roth's Terms & Conditions.
Primary Documents (sample sites)
USA: see also American
History e-Texts
Least
Tern