Department of English

Library Resources

This page will eventually contain links to library resources in many subcategories of research in English. The top-ten list, the first installment, is up and running, and well worth your time. Check back for updates in sub-fields. Library Resources listed on this page are mostly under the category of licensed access to UW-Madison students, faculty, and staff, so outside visitors may not be able to access all items.

Top Ten Resources Every English Graduate Student Should Know About

  1. Academic Search

    Academic Search is a full text database of more than 3000 journals. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Christian Science Monitor are also indexed. It covers many academic areas, including business, social sciences, humanities, general science, education, and multi-cultural. Searches may be limited to retrieve only peer-reviewed titles (approximately 1700). Dates vary, but many of the full-text titles go back to 1990. A business directory is also included.

  2. Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)

    ABELL has long been regarded as an essential bibliography of English language and literature in English. Issued in printed volumes since 1921, it is the British equivalent of the MLA Bibliography, but different enough in its coverage and the journals it indexes that the overlap is surprisingly far from complete. ABELL covers monographs, periodical articles, critical editions, books reviews, collections of essays and dissertations. Subject areas covered are: English language, English literature, bibliography, and traditional culture of the English-speaking world. Coverage is international and includes articles in languages other than English.

  3. Current Contents

    Current Contents provides access to essential bibliographic information from the world's leading scholarly research journals in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The journals included are indexed within days of publication, and include 7,500 international journals covering all disciplines. Complete bibliographic information is provided for each article, review, letter, note and editorial listed. Searchable abstracts are available for about 75% of the documents.

  4. Early English Books Online

    Early English Books Online (EEBO) provides full-text images of almost all the books printed in England and her colonies from the beginning of printing to 1700 (about 125,000 titles). You can search for books on your topic by author, title,and keyword, or search just for illustrations from these books if you wish. EEBO includes the items listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661), and additional supplementary materials. Gradually, searchable electronic text versions of a selection of these books are being added to the project. These searchable texts are called: EEBO-TCP, the Early English Books Online Text Creation Project. Eventually both EEBO and EEBO-TCP will be combined into one database. For now, in addition to using Early English Books Online (EEBO), check EEBO-TCP if you want to do want to do keyword searching within an individual work.

  5. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

    The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), when completed, will include searchable full-text and images of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom and in the British colonies during the eighteenth century. Approximately 150,000 items are included. Subjects include: history, geography, social sciences, fine arts, medicine, science, technology, literature and language, law, and reference materials.

  6. Humanities Full Text

    Humanities Full Text indexes 400 English language periodicals. Its subject matter covers archaeology and classical studies, art, film, folklore, history, journalism, linguistics, literature, music, performing arts, philosophy, religion, and theology. Feature articles are indexed, as are interviews, obituaries, bibliographies, and reviews of plays, operas, ballets, dance, musicals, movies, television and radio. There are abstracts beginning with 1994. Full-text articles from 96 journals have been added beginning with 1996.

  7. JSTOR: Journal Storage Project

    JSTOR is a full-text journal database which provides access more than 400 titles in the fields of African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, botany, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, language, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, political science, population/demography, sociology, and statistics. Coverage begins with volume one of each title and continues to within 3 to 5 years of the most current issue, depending on the title. The ?moving wall? represents the time period between the last issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal; it is specified by publishers in their license agreements with JSTOR. Graphs, photographs, and other images are included. UW-Madison Libraries have acquired the following JSTOR collections ( details of coverage available): Arts & Sciences I; Arts & Sciences II; Business; Ecology & Botany; General Science; Language & Literature; Music.

  8. Literature Resource Center

    Literature Resource Center includes information on a large number of authors and literary works taken from Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and other sources. In addition to biographical information, LRC includes full-text articles from more than 130 literary journals, a dictionary of literary terms, and links to 5,000 relevant Web sites and special collections.

  9. MLA International Bibliography

    The Modern Language Association International Bibliography indexes 3,000 English language and foreign periodicals as well as books, book chapters, and dissertations. Its subject matter includes critical works on literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. Reviews of literary and scholarly works are not included. There are no abstracts.

  10. OED Online: Oxford English Dictionary

    The OED Online contains the complete contents of the 20-volume Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and three Additions volumes published from 1993-97. It also includes quarterly releases of work in progress from the complete revision of the OED which is currently underway. Each of the 616,000 entries contains the etymology, definition, part of speech, date of origination, pronunciation, cross-references, and quotations.

  11. Project Muse

    Project Muse is a full-text database of more than forty scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Dates of coverage vary for each journal.

  12. World Shakespeare Bibliography

    A comprehensive bibliography, international in scope, with coverage extending to more than 92 languages, which will, when complete, provide 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 published or produced since 1900. Each year, coverage will move forward one year and backwards at least three years. The current version includes more than 60,500 entries. The database includes and expands on the annual issue of Shakespeare Quarterly entitled: World Shakespeare Bibliography.

Medieval Literature and Medieval Studies

Shakespeare

British Literature, 1500 to the Present

American Literature, Colonial to the Present

African-American Literature

Native American Literature

Postcolonial Literature and Theory

Creative Writing

Gender and Language

Women's Studies

Critical Theory

Literacy

Rhetoric

Linguistics

Pedagogy

(rev. 10/2004)


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