English Language Subject Resources
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The Modern English Collection (AD 1500-present)
New! 1,800 of these Modern English titles now available also as ebooks for the Microsoft Reader!
Browse by subject: African American, including Letters from Liberia; Native American; American Civil War; Salem Witch Trials; Colonial Currency; Early American Fiction; Alexander Hamilton; Thomas Jefferson; Edgar Allan Poe; Mark Twain; Walt Whitman; William Shakespeare; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Women Writers; Young Readers; Literature in Translation; Best Sellers, 1900-1930; UVa Special Collections; Walter Reed Collection.
9,575 titles including 203,725 manuscript, book, and newspaper illustrations (including covers, spines, book illustrations, and page images), many of which are publicly accessible.
The Middle English Collection
65 titles, most of which are publicly-accessible
The Old English Corpus
Approximately 3,000 titles (UVA only)
The English Poetry Database (AD 600-1900):
165,000 poems from about 4,500 separate printed sources (80 images -- shape poems, Hebrew phrases, printers' devices). (VIVA only)
The English Verse Drama Database (AD 1300-1900) :
2,200 works by 800 playwrights (7 images) (VIVA only)
English Prose Drama:
1,653 plays (167 images) (UVA only)
Early English Prose Fiction (AD 1500-1700):
200 works (285 images, mostliy book illustrations) (UVA only)
Eighteenth-Century Fiction:
77 works (97 images, mostly book illustations; 1,557 page images for Tristram Shandy) (UVA only)
Early American Fiction, 1789-1875:
886 volumes of early American fiction (1789-1875) by 136 authors, including works by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, and Lydia Maria Child. Each text exists as a full set of color page-images (over 124,527 in all) and a searchable XML/SGML text. The entire database is available by to UVA only or by subscription;
158 volumes by 52 authors are publicly-available in ebook and web versions.
The 20th-Century American Poetry Database:
Thousands of poems from 316 works (1,393 images, including shape poems, portraits,and illustrations) (UVA only)
The American Poetry Database, up to 1900.
40,356 poems from 1,288 works by 209 poets (19 images, mostly Hebrew) (VIVA only)
The African American Poetry Database
2,500 poems in 100 works (5 images, musical notation) (VIVA only)
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition
(VIVA only) The 22-volume Oxford English Dictionary, second edition: 291,593 main entries including 2,435,660 illustrative quotations.
Shakespeare Resources
Including The Shakespeare First Folio and various other editions and adaptions of Shakespeare (many publicly-accessible works); includes 2,272 color digital facsimiles.
Religious Resources
Several Bibles, the Book of Mormon, and the Koran (publicly-accessible)
The Bible in English
21 versions of the English Bible (UVA only)
Past Masters® Philosophy Databases
from InteLex, including works in various languages by Anselm (Opera Omnia -- Latin -- 5 vols) ; Thomas Aquinas (Collected Works -- English -- 48 works) ; Aristotle, (Collected Works -- English -- 50 works) George Berkeley (Collected works -- English -- 34 works) ; British Philosophy 1600-1900: Francis Bacon [4 works] , Thomas Hobbes [25 works] , L. A. Selby-Bigge [1 work] , Anne Conway [2 works] , John Locke [2 works] , Bishop George Berkeley [4 works] , David Hume [8 works] , Adam Smith [1 work] , David Ricardo [1 work] , John Stuart Mill [10 works] , Edmund Burke [1 work], Jeremy Bentham [2 works], Henry Sidgwick [2 works]; Continental Rationalists Rene Descartes [2 works] , Benedict de Spinoza [1 work] , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [2 works]; John Dewey (Collected Works -- 35 volumes) ; David Hume, Works, Correspondence, and History [13 works] ; Immanuel Kant, Hauptwerke [German -- 11 works] ; Nietzsches Werke [German -- 20 volumes] ; William of Ockham, Work of Ninety Days ; Ludwig Wittgenstein: [14 works, English translations of some of the works in the German-language Nachlass"] ; Charles Sanders Pierce, Collected papers [8 volumes] ; Plato, Collected Dialogues [34 works] ; Political Philospohy: Machievelli to Mill: Machiavelli [2 works], Hobbes [3 works], Locke [1 work], Hume [1 work], Rousseau [4 works], Hamilton, Madison, Jay [2 works], Burke [1 work], Paine [1 work], Bentham [2 works], Mill [5 works]; Henry Sidgwick, Collected works [217 works] (UVA only)
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
from Routledge [including links from the Encyclopedia to our full-text philosophy holdings] (UVA only)
The Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1973-74.
Harper's Weekly Full-Text:
Fully searchable Database and Page Images : (1857-1903) (UVA only) (59,002 page images, many pages with multiple figurative illustrations)
Harper's Weekly Index:
Fully searchable Index and Page Images : The Civil War Era and Reconstruction, part 1 (1857-1871) (UVA only)
Accessible Archives Newspapers:
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The Pennsylvania Gazette. Volumes I-IV: 1728-1800.
(UVA only)
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African American Newspapers, 1827-1860.
This database currently includes the following titles:
Freedom's Journal (1827-1830) New York, New York ;
Colored American (1837-1841) New York, New York ;
The North Star (1847-1851) Rochester, New York ;
Frederick Douglass Paper (1851-1859) ;
National Era (1847-1860) ;
Provincial Freeman (1854-1857).
(UVA only)
- The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective. Includes text and images from The New York Herald, the Richmond Enquirer, and The Charleston Mercury published from November 1860 through May 1865. (UVA only)
Special Collections electronic texts
From the University of Virginia collections (all users)
British Poetry 1780-1910: a Hypertext Archive
(all users). Includes:
- The S. T. Coleridge Archive
- Works by Lewis Carroll, Ann Batten Cristall, Alfred Edward Housman, Richard Polwhele, Mary Robinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- The Germ, Volumes 1-4 1850
Documenting the African American Experience.
(Readex, 1995). Sample titles, two with digital images, from the Documentary Sources Database. American Multiculturalism Series, Unit One. (all users)
Michael Plunkett, Afro-American Sources in Virginia. A Guide to Manuscripts.
Revised edition, with illustrations. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1995. (all users)
Rita Dove, "Lady Freedom Among Us."
The University of Virginia Four-Millionth Volume. [Includes text, images, audio, and video.] (all users)
Michigan Early Modern English Materials
(all users)