Literature in English: Digital primary source collections: archives & manuscripts
A guide to primary and secondary research resources for literary studies in English.
British literature: digital archival and manuscript collections
- British literary manuscripts onlinePresents facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials from the medieval period through the 19th century. Sourced from the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and other major collections from British and American libraries.
- The digital Temple: a documentary edition of George Herbert's English verseThe Digital Temple offers diplomatic and modern-spelling transcriptions of Williams MS. Jones B62, Bodleian MS. Tanner 307, and The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, first edition (STC 13183, Folger Shakespeare Library copy).
- Eighteenth century drama: censorship, society and the stageDigitized from the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library, 18th Century Drama is a unique archive of almost every play submitted for license between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Materials include correspondence, financial documents, and portraits.
- Jane Austen's fiction manuscriptsGathers together digital versions of approximately 1,100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. These manuscripts trace Jane Austen’s development as a writer from childhood to her death in 1817.
- Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archives, 1554-2007Digitized material from the archive of the Stationers' Company, including constitutional records, court records, membership records, financial records, trade records, general administrative records, and charities and property records. The Stationers' Company Archive is one of the most important resources for understanding the workings of the early book trade, the establishment of legal requirements for publishing, especially copyright provisions, the printing and publishing community and the history of bookbinding."
- London low life: street culture, social reform and the Victorian underworldDigital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to the street literature of 19th and early 20th century London. The documents are drawn from the holdings of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.
- Perdita manuscripts: women writers, 1500-1700Complete facsimile images of over 230 manuscripts written or compiled by women living in the British Isle during the 16th and 17th centuries. Contents include account books, advice, culinary writing, meditation, travel writing, and verse.
- Romanticism: life, literature & landscape, ca. 1606-1983Digitized from the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, this digital collection offers unique access to the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Robert Southey.
- Shakespeare in performance: prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare LibraryPrompt books for performances of Shakespeare’s plays between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, and supporting material for 17 selected plays. Documents are indexed by genre, country, theatre, associated names, and other key search terms. Also present: ephemera, photographs, illustrations, music scores, correspondence, and illustrations.
- Victorian popular cultureContains a wide range of source material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain, and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930, including spiritualism and magic, circuses, music hall culture, theater, optical entertainments, and the advent of cinema.
American literature: digital archival and manuscript collections
- Emily Dickinson's correspondences: a born-digital textual inquiryUnpublished in book form in her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson nonetheless enjoyed an extensive distribution through her letters. More than one-third of her poems appeared in her letters to family and friends. Emily Dickinson's Correspondences includes seventy-four poems and letters from Emily’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confidante, Susan Dickinson.
- Typee: a fluid-text editionOne of America's most startling fluid texts, Herman Melville's Typee exists in multiple critically diverse versions, in both manuscript and print. Based on the recently discovered working draft of Typee, this electronic edition offers digital images, a transcription of each manuscript page, corresponding print texts, and a dynamic reading text, which allows readers to inspect the revision sequences and narratives of more than 1000 revision sites.
- Radical scatters: Emily Dickinson's fragments and related texts, 1870-1886Radical Scatters features eighty-two documents carrying over one hundred fragmentary texts composed by Dickinson in the final decades of her life. In addition to the core texts, the archive’s primary materials include fifty-three poems, letters, and other writings by Dickinson with direct links to the fragments.
- Last Updated: Jan 15, 2025 3:29 PM
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