LibGuides: Popular Culture for Composition: Websites

Websites

The web can provide excellent resources for your topic, but if you are only using Google and Wikipedia to find information, you may not be finding all of the information that is available on you topic. If you are being asked to use scholarly resources use the resources you can find in the Cortland Memorial Library Catalog!

The Library of the University of Berkeley website provides a guide how to "evaluate websites".

Organizations

Modern Language Association

Professional Societies and Organizations often provide valuable information on their websites: publications, news, workshops and competition announcements.

National Council of Teachers of English

Featured Websites

Favorite Poem Project
Americans reading and talking about the poems important to them.
Dime Novel and Popular Literature Collection, Villanova University
A digital archive of a wide range of popular literature, heavily reflecting contemporary ideas of race, culture, and gender, from approximately 1860-1930.
The Shelley-Godwin Archive
A collection of papers by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. It includes a digitized manuscript of Frankenstein.
Middle English Dictionary
"Its 15,000 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."
Digital Thoreau
"Digital Thoreau is a resource and a community dedicated to promoting the deliberate reading of Thoreau’s works in new ways, ways that take advantage of technology to illuminate Thoreau’s creative process and facilitate thoughtful conversation about his words and ideas."
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Digital Thoreau is a resource and a community dedicated to promoting the deliberate reading of Thoreau's works in new ways, ways that take advantage of technology to illuminate Thoreau's creative process and facilitate thoughtful conversation about his words and ideas.
Emily Dickinson Archive
Emily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives.
Early English Drama & Performance
"The Network seeks to bring together the many researchers, students and practitioners working with medieval and early modern drama and performance, from plays and pageants, music and poetry, disguisings and royal processions to questions of methodology, theory and pedagogy. In doing so, it seeks to encourage and facilitate cross-disciplinary, cross-period dialogue in the field and to act as a central hub for the community on the internet."
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Here you will find the latest news about research, publications, funding opportunities and events, which you can follow by signing-up to receive regular email updates or following us on Twitter. There is also a Forum for your discussions.
Records of Early English Drama
"The REED Patrons and Performances Web Site is designed to include a wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom."
William Faulkner on the Web
Information about the works of Faulkner, his life, and criticism on the author.
Folger Digital Texts
Free, high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare's plays start with the basics: superb source texts, meticulously edited on the basis of current scholarship. The plays in Folger Digital Texts are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, completed in 2010 by editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine and published by Simon & Schuster.
William Blake Archive
"A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees."
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A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees. The Archive contains searchable and scalable electronic editions of copies of Blake's illuminated books in the context of full, up-to-date bibliographic information about each image, carefully edited transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. Also included are examples of Blake's other work—commercial book illustrations, separate prints, drawings and paintings, and manuscripts—as well as a searchable electronic version of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, the standard printed edition for reference.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger is part of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald held by the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, located in the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C.
The digital version of the Ledger, which includes access to the full text and is keyword-searchable, was produced by the staff of the Digital Collections Department of the University of South Carolina.
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable.
Kate Chopin International Society
KateChopin.org is an informational site, an educational site, a non-profit site. It does not post commercial messages. The site is sponsored by the Kate Chopin International Society. It is revised regularly.
19th Century British Pamphlets
This website focuses on 19th Century British pamphlets. It describes pamphlet collections, has links to catalogues and digitised pamphlets, and provides resources to assist those wanting to use pamphlets within their research or teaching.
Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection
This digital collection was launched to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, a joint venture of the Ransom Center and the Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. It incorporates images of all of Poe's manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center (linked to transcriptions by the Poe Society of Baltimore) with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections.
James Joyce Checklist
The James Joyce Checklist is a database of citations and links to publications relevant to Joyce in any language and in any medium, from the early twentieth century to the present. The Checklist is an ongoing project with both current and retrospective material being added on a quarterly basis.
Mark Twain Project Online
"Mark Twain Project Online's intuitive interface and customizable tools provide a powerful research and reading experience: perform focused searches, browse the site's significant collection of writings, view notes and variants alongside the text, collect writings for future retrieval, and generate standardized digital citations."

More Websites

Here are more English Literature websites. Many are affiliated with universities and some are not. Please remember to critically evaluate your sources.

18th Century Resources-Literature
Authors, criticism, and historical details from the era.
18th Connect
18th Century Scholarship Online
19th Century American Literary, Historical, & Cultural Studies
"This site is designed to bring together at one place the best materials available on the Web for studying and teaching about 19th century American literature, history and culture. Our aim is to make the site useful to teachers, scholars and students at all levels of education."
19th Century British Pamphlets
Important historical sources on 19th century Britain.
Chaucer Metapage
"This project was initiated at the 33rd International Congress of Medieval Studies by a group of medievalists interested in promoting Chaucer studies on the WWW. Its aims are to organize and provide navigation aides for Chaucer resources on the WWW, to work towards enhancing and extending those resources, and to encourage Chaucer studies, including those undertaken via 'distance learning,' at all levels of education."
Dickens Project
"The Project creates opportunities for collaborative research on Dickens and the Victorian age, and disseminates research findings through annual conferences, institutes, and publications. It supports the professional development of graduate students and produces curricular material for teaching Victorian literature at both secondary and post-secondary levels."
Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection
"Incorporates images of all of Poe's manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center (linked to transcriptions by the Poe Society of Baltimore) with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections."
Every Writer's Resource
A collection of resources for aspiring writers.
Irish Studies Web-Irish Literature
Online resources from the Association of College and Research Libraries' Western European Studies Section.
Jack London Online Collection
Biographical information, writings, and criticism dealing with the author.
James Joyce Checklist
"The James Joyce Checklist is a database of citations and links to publications relevant to Joyce in any language and in any medium, from the early twentieth century to the present."
Life and Works of Herman Melville
"The Life and Works of Herman Melville is a publication dedicated to disseminating information about Herman Melville on the Internet and the World Wide Web."
Literature Map
Like an author? Use this to find other authors of interest.
Literature Study Online
Links and resources assembled by an editor and professor of English literature.
Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature
A selection of resources on English literature from medieval times to the eighteenth century.
Medieval Manuscripts on the Web
A list of digitized manuscripts available online.
NINES
19th Century Scholarship Online
Paris Review: Interviews
A forum for fiction, criticism, and authors commenting upon their work.