Creative Writing: Databases

ABELL contains over 700,000 records covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards.

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.

The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

The Archive is a not-for-profit organisation with charitable status. It is run by a small staff, supported by a distinguished board of trustees and a panel of specialist advisers. We depend for our existence on funding from public bodies, charitable trusts and generous individuals. The money we earn from sales of Poetry Archive CDs goes towards making more recordings.

A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 135 volumes by 49 poets.

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.

A combination of Chadwyck-Healey's English Verse Drama and English Prose Drama full-text databases. 4,000 plays by 1,200 authors from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century.

Past Masters is a collection of primary-source full-text humanities databases. Past Masters titles are usually comprised of the complete works of individual authors.

Orlando provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.

The electronic edition of Heinemann's African Writers Series, providing searchable online access to the founding works of modern African literature from 1962-2003, mostly now out of print. Over 260 volumes of fiction, poetry, myths, drama, memoirs and reportage are included from a wide geographic range across Africa, mostly written in English but including some translated volumes. Each work is available in full text, re-keyed from authoritative editions, and every author has an author page with links to all their works and a biography specially commissioned for the collection.

This collection of primary source documents offers a rich seam of information on subjects such as: Daily life and routines in the army and auxiliary services; Trench warfare and Conditions in the trenches; Food and supplies; Battles and warfare; Training and discipline; Weapons and equipment; Camaraderie and friendship; Death; Health and medicine; Thoughts on the enemy. More complex themes of faith, morale, citizenship, mortality, masculinity, race and class can also be explored.

Material includes Diaries and journals; Letters; Personal narratives and reminiscences; Trench literature and soldiers' journals; Postcards; Scrapbooks and albums; Photographs and 360° views of personal items and objects; Sketches and paintings; Ephemera; Sheet music; Photographs; War art; Cartoons and comics; Propaganda and recruiting posters; Trench maps

Welcome to Empire Online. By the end of 2007 Adam Matthew Publications will have brought together over 70,000 images of original documents relating to Empire Studies. The images are sourced from libraries and archives around the world, including a strong core of document images from the British Library; The National Archives, Kew; The Bodleian Library, Oxford; The Victoria and Albert Museum; Church Mission Society Archive; University of Birmingham; The National Archives of Canada; The Glenbow Museum, Canada; The National Library of Australia; The Bank of England Library; Birmingham Central Library; State Records, New South Wales; The National Library of Scotland; The London Library; National Gallery of Canada; University of Michigan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

There is a good balance between manuscript and printed material and a broad range of document types; written by men and women from both the European and the non-European perspective:

Exploration journals and logs.

Letter books and correspondence

Periodicals

Diaries

Official Government Papers

Missionary papers

Travel writing

Slave papers

Memoirs

Fiction

Children's Adventure Stories

Traditional; folk tales

Exhibition Catalogues and guides

Maps

Marketing Posters

Photographs

Illustrations, including many in colour

Published in five thematic sections, Empire On-Line is fully searchable and offers thematic essays by leading scholars, embedded with hypertext links which relate directly to the documentary evidence provided. Later sections will concentrate on Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire (Section II); The Visible Empire (Section III); Religion & Empire (Section IV); and Race, Class & Colonialism (Section V).

This collection brings to life the teeming streets of Victorian London, inviting students and scholars to explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of London in the 19th century. From salacious ‘swell’s guides’ to scandalous broadsides and subversive posters, the material sold and exchanged on London’s bustling thoroughfares offers an unparalleled insight into the dark underworld of the city. Children’s chapbooks, street cries, slang dictionaries and ballads were all part of a vibrant culture of street literature.

This is also an incredible visual resource for students and scholars of London, with many full colour maps, cartoons, sketches and a full set of the essential Tallis’ Street Views of London – resource for the study of London architecture and commerce. Also includes George Gissing's famous London scrapbooks from the Pforzheimer Collection, containing his research for London novels such as New Grub Street and The Netherworld.

Victorian Popular Culture contains a wide range of source material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930, and shows how interconnected these worlds were. It is comprised of 4 separate sections: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic, Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks, Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment, Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema.