English Language and Literature: Books

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.

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.

From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this incomparable collection contains over 96,000 images of titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475 - 1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised edition. Libraries possessing this collection find they are able to fulfill the most exhaustive research requirements of graduate scholars in the areas of English literature, history, philosophy, theology, art and music, politics, and the history of science and medicine.

EEBO Text Creation Partnership is an extension of the EEBO image resource. The project encodes the books in XML with a version of the TEI allowing researchers to do full text and other searches. Already there are around 1500 titles online and with several hundred being added each month it is an increasingly valuable resource. The aim of the EEBO TCP project is eventually to make 25,000 books available in this way.

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.

Available for the first time online, Oxford's scholarly editions provide trustworthy, annotated primary texts for scholars and students.

OSEO currently includes writers active between 1485 and 1837, plus Classical Latin poets — from Jane Austen, Jeremy Bentham, Catullus, and John Donne through to Virgil and Wordsworth.

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.

Alternative name: Fulcrum
 

The resource contains a collection of over 1,700 full-text scholarly monographs in largely history encompassing the history of Britain, Europe, America, Africa, Middle East and Asia, but also a small collection of history of science and women's studies. It contains both in-print and out-of-print books published between 1900 and c 2004. The books are fully seachable and link to book reviews published in JSTOR journals and H-Net.

Cambridge Collections Online offers subject or theme based collections of content within a richly functional, fully cross-searchable online environment. The Complete Cambridge Companions is available as a complete collection and as two sub-collections comprising the Cambridge Companions in Literature and Classics and the Cambridge Companions in Philosophy, Religion and Culture. Each collection is updated with new Companions on publication.

CHO is a digital collection of 250+ titles published since 1960 as part of the Cambridge Histories series. The collection presents an authoritative reference compendium for histories of many countries (e.g. Britain, Europe, US, Middle East, Far East, Latin America) and over 15 academic subjects (e.g. Classics, History, History of Science, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Religion).

The resource includes personalisation features, such as saved searches, workspaces and bookmarks, and citation export functionality.

Contains the complete 'Cambridge Ancient History'.

Ebsco's ebook collection is a collection of e-books purchased by Oxford librarians. Currently there are over 2,000 purchased books ('Our Collection') as well as over 3000 free e-books.

Access to each e-book is limited to one or, more commonly, two simultaneous users, depending on the individual book licence.

New books are being purchased on a regular basis.

Deatils on accessing the ebooks on this platform are at: http://ox.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=19854712.

Oxford Academic includes over 40,000 academic ebooks from Oxford University Press and other university presses, including:

• American University in Cairo Press
• British Academy
• University of California Press
• University of Chicago Press
• Columbia University Press
• Cornell University Press
• Edinburgh University Press
• University Press of Florida
• Fordham University Press
• University of Hawai‘i Press
• Hong Kong University Press
• University of Illinois Press
• University Press of Kentucky
• Liverpool University Press
• Manchester University Press
• University of Minnesota Press
• University Press of Mississippi
• MIT Press
• University of North Carolina Press
• NYU Press
• Policy Press
• Princeton University Press
• Stanford University Press
• Yale University Press

Includes medical ebooks previously available through the Oxford Medicine Online platform. To access medicine content, select "Subject" -> "Medicine and Health".

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.

The Dictionary of Old English was conceived by Angus Cameron, its founding editor, as an historical dictionary in the tradition established by Sir James Murray for the Oxford English Dictionary. The Dictionary of Old English is based on records written in English between 600 and 1150 A.D.

Please note that this version which runs in a web browser has no search facility - you just have to browse alphabetically.

The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus is an online database consisting of at least one copy of every Old English text. In some cases, more than one copy is included if it is significant because of dialect or date. As such, the DOE Web Corpus represents about four million words of Old English and another million words of Latin, or about six times the collected works of Shakespeare. It has been compiled as part of the Dictionary of Old English project at the University of Toronto, and is fully searchable.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. AD 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards.
On this website the dictionary is now available in updated online form for the first time, complete with advanced search tools enabling search by definition and history, and an expanded bibliography of slang sources from the early modern period to the present day. Since the print edition, nearly 60,000 quotations have been added, supporting 5,000 new senses in 2,500 new entries and sub-entries, of which around half are new slang terms from the last five years.

Note that this is a free version with no access to protected content.

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods. It contains over 1300 lexicons of which 215 have been made searchable by the University of Toronto.

Alternative name: MED
 

The Middle English Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources,including a large collection of Middle English texts. Hypertext links offer quick connections between, e.g., an MED citation, bibliographical information about its source, and an electronic version of the source, if one is included in the collection (we hope eventually to have electronic versions of all the source texts).

The Electronic Middle English Dictionary

The print Middle English Dictionary, now nearing completion, has been described as "the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America." Its projected 15,000 odd pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.

HyperBibliography of Middle English

The HyperBibliography of Middle English includes all the Middle English materials which are cited in the Middle English Dictionary. Although this bibliography is not exhaustive, it offers what we believe to be the most comprehensive single list of these materials available. Titles have been adopted from A Manual of the Writings in Middle English whenever possible, and are followed by the MED stencil (short title) in brackets. Once you retrieve a list of works or authors or manuscripts by browsing or searching, click on any item to move to a page of information about manuscripts, editions, etc.

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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.

Who’s Who, published annually since 1849 and the first biographical book of its kind, is among the world’s most recognised and respected works of reference. It contains over 33,000 short biographies, continually updated, of living noteworthy and influential individuals, from all walks of life, worldwide. Approximately one thousand new entries are added every year.

Each biographee supplies the original information for their entry and is then sent an annual proof for updating. Our editors also monitor the press and other sources of reference for day-to-day changes and additions. The information contained in a Who’s Who entry is essentially autobiographical, its integrity and accuracy ensured by constant independent research.

In 1920 the first volume of Who Was Who was published, providing a wealth of material for researchers without easy access to the earlier individual volumes of Who's Who. This first edition was composed of the entries of those who had died between 1897 and 1915 with the date of death added to each. Subsequent volumes of Who Was Who — there are now eleven — cover the years from 1916 to 2005. Published originally at ten-year intervals, and now every five years, each new edition provides an opportunity for revision and correction where necessary, using many sources of reference. However, as no account is taken of the many changes that may have been made to an entry during a life, serious researchers may, on occasion, wish to consult the individual volumes of Who’s Who to obtain a fuller picture.

Who Was Who has proved invaluable in identifying not only those who shaped the events of their time but others, now forgotten, who were familiar names to the journalists and diarists who recorded the events of the day. An essential tool for researchers is the companion volume, A Cumulated Index to Who Was Who 1897-2000. Until its publication, a name could be found only by knowing, or guessing at, the date of death, so that the