Aphorisms on Finding Literature

Perhaps the best way to discover literature that you don’t know about is to find an anthology relevant to your needs and to scan through the table of contents. Four publishing houses that produce big anthologies that will be helpful are:

Go to their websites, search for a relevant anthology, go borrow it from your library, and then scan through the table of contents until you find what you are looking for.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a great resource for finding literary works. It’s a terrible resource for interpreting literary works, but it’s great for discovering what’s out there.

Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) offers the full text of over 49,000 free ebooks.

Literature Online (http://literature.proquest.com) is perhaps the closest thing to an anthology of all English literature that’s available on the internet, with over a third of a million full-text works of poetry, prose, and drama in English. It’s behind a paywall that you must use your university association to access.

The English Short Title Catalog (http://estc.bl.uk) offers a searchable list of over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800.

Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/) contains facsimiles and sometimes digitized versions of 125,000 books published before 1700. It is easiest to search if you Sort Results "Earliest Publication First" and Display "40 Results per page." Enter your author in the Author Keyword(s) to see what other texts he or she wrote; get a sense of the chronology of your author's works, and note how many editions of his or her works are published (and who published them). Search for some relevant themes in the Subject Keyword(s); here it's helpful to enter a keyword and "select from a list," which will give you more results or allow you to specify them. Finally, search full texts by entering some of those themes in the Keyword(s) box; here you should "Check for Variants," and tick all the variant spellings. You can also use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) as well as proximity operators (NEAR, FBY) and the truncation operator (*). Of course, you can target your research by combining these searches; for example, fill both the Author Keyword(s) and the full text Keyword(s) box, or both the Subject Keyword(s) and then the Limit by Date fields. Keep track of the texts you discover and add relevant texts to your Historical Sources (and, if applicable, your Primary Texts).

For the early modern era, also check out Anniina Jokinen’s Luminarium (http://www.luminarium.org) and Risa Bear’s Renascence Editions (www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions).

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/) contains nearly 200,000 titles published in the eighteenth century.

I prefer to research eighteenth and nineteenth century texts in Google Books (http://books.google.com), which includes just as many full texts in a better interface. In Google Books, using the Advanced Book Search, limit the Publication Date to the eighteenth century, or the nineteenth century, or even more specific time periods; then repeat your keyword and subject searches. Having Google return 100 results per page makes for the quickest scanning of your searches.

Films are catalogued at the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com).

Visual arts like drawings, paintings, textiles, photographs, sculptures, and architecture can be found in both ArtStor (http://library.artstor.org) and Google Images (http://www.google.com/imghp).