English Literature for Continuing Education short courses: Oxford's online resources

The Bibliography of English Women Writers 1500-1640 has evolved into a still-growing list of scholarship about 738 recovered writers and located texts, canonical and non-canonical. It identifies many hitherto unknown writers, including among them not only already familiar figures, but also women refugees such as the recusants, women in the colonies, Marrano women (Anusot), women translators, and English women writers in French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.

The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1962 and the present.
This release of the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced between 1962 and the present. The scope is international, with coverage extending to more than 120 languages and representing every country in North America, South America, and Europe and nearly every country in Asia, Africa, and Australasia. The more than 136,000 records in this version cite several hundred thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (BWLD), includes the immediate experiences of 430 women, as revealed in approximately 80,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before.

When complete, the collection will include more than 100,000 pages of primary materials spanning more than 300 years. Each source has been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies.

The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Alternative names: Arden Shakespeare ; Nick Hern books
 

Drama Online provides access to the searchable full-text of thousands of plays, drawn from the Methuen Drama, Arden Shakespeare, Faber, Nick Hern, Aurora Metro and Oberon Books lists to form a collection of the most studied, performed and critically acclaimed plays from Aeschylus to the present day. Over 100 critical and contextual works are also included, as well as biographical and bibliographical information for each playwright. The collection will be regularly updated with the latest works from new and established writers. This resource includes access to video recordings of Shakespeare performances from the Globe, the RSC and the Donmar, and performances from the National Theatre.

Please note: Oxford has access to most but not all content.

Purchase of the National Theatre Collection 1 was partly funded by the Drue Heinz Fund.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online is a comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, the world's largest library of the printed book on microfilm, available through its imprint Primary Source Microfilm. In the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken, nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 will be made available online over the course of the next two years. When complete, the product will allow full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material, in essence, every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online provides research opportunities in ways previously unavailable to a wide range of data spanning all disciplines. It is one of the largest sources of rare materials ever collected in microfilm and electronic formats. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. As the eighteenth century opened, the expiration of the strict controls that previously existed over printing, coupled with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, resulted in the proliferation of printing operations across the country and in turn, created an explosion of literacy. For the first time, a large segment of the population was exposed to a vast array of printed material. Social and economic criticism flourished; theories on man and society were set forth and debated.

Essentially the complete English poetic canon from 1100 to 1900. Over 165,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.

250 novels from the period 1782 to 1903, including works by all the major Victorian novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, the Bront‹s, Eliot and Hardy, as well as the landmarks of Gothic and other fiction from the Romantic period.

Wiley Online Library is a leading international resource for quality content promoting discovery across the spectrum of scientific, technical, medical and professional endeavors. Access to over 1,000 journals including, in many cases, the backfiles. We have access to some reference works but do not have access to most e-books on the Wiley platform.

The multi-volume (366 print volumes as of July 2011) Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature, time periods and countries, placing writers (authors, journalists, biographers, etc.) and their publishers in the larger perspective of literary history. Each author profile gathers together biographical information, lists of principal works and biographies, a bibliography of works about the author, illustrations and portraits, facsimiles of MSS and revised typescripts, as well as letters and other documents. This online edition allows users to access the information though a range of sophisticated search options.

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In order to access ODNB, please follow the link above. If you are accessing remotely, you may be prompted to enter your SSO credentials. You will then be taken to the ODNB homepage, and you should see a message “University of Oxford” displayed above the login box. At this point you will have gained access to full text articles, and there is no need to log in on the ODNB homepage. In order to access the articles from the search results, you will need to click on their titles. If you still have experienced problems with ODNB, please clear your cache and cookies, as previous unsuccessful login attempts may be interfering with the current session, and then follow the above instructions again. The recent issues with ODNB's new interface have been flagged with the OUP.

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After twelve years' work, involving over 10,000 people, writing and editing 60 million words to produce a 60 volume book, and a website with over 100,000 pages, the Oxford DNB was published on 23 September 2004.

An illustrated collection of 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past, from the fourth century BC to the year 2000. Remarkable people in any walk of life who were connected with the British Isles - excluding living people. It includes not just the great and good, but people who have left a mark for any reason, good, bad, or bizarre.

The OED Online contains the complete text of the 20-volume Second Edition, first published in 1989, together with its 3-volume Additions Series, published in 1993 (volumes 1 and 2) and 1997 (volume 3). Many of the entries in the Additions volumes consist of sections which are additions to an entry previously published in the Second Edition; such sections are appended to the end of the appropriate Second Edition entry. Complete entries published for the first time in the Additions volumes are presented as free-standing entries, along with entries from the Second Edition.

The service is updated with at least 1500 new and revised words each quarter and the new material which is generated by the revision programme is only available online. Revised entries are also presented as free-standing entries, enabling users to compare views of words, as well as evidence of usage over time.

Oxford Reference Online brings together over 450 reference works published by Oxford University Press into a single cross-searchable resource. It includes English and bilingual dictionaries, English grammar and usage guides, quotations and subject-specific reference works.

It is updated regularly with new titles, new editions, new entries, full-colour maps and illustrations, timelines, weblinks, and bibliographies.

Oxford Bibliographies are comprehensive subject bibliographies, which provide an up-to-date overview of the most recent and authoritative scholarship in a given field. Oxford Bibliographies provides faculty and students alike with a seamless pathway to the most accurate and reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Every article in the database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, written and reviewed by academic experts, with original commentary and annotations. The modules include:

African American Studies, African Studies, American Literature, Anthropology, Art History, Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, British and Irish Literature, Buddhism, Childhood Studies, Chinese Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Classics, Communication, Criminology, Ecology, Education, Environmental Science, Evolutionary Biology, Geography, Hinduism, International Law, International Relations, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Latino Studies, Linguistics, Literary and Critical Theory, Management, Medieval Studies, Military History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Public Health, Renaissance and Reformation, Social Work, Sociology, Victorian Literature.