Internet sites for English and Drama

There are a large number of English and Drama resources available on the Web and some selected sites are listed below. There are many other useful and relevant sites available. If you are new to using the Internet, try an Internet tutorial which can teach you the basics of searching effectively.

Subject gateways

Subject information gateways are Web resources primarily devoted to collecting high quality sites in a particular subject area.

Electronic texts

See also the E-books for English Studies guide for details of collections of e-books which the Library subscribes to.

  • Google Books
  • Internet Library of Early Journals : a digital library of 18th and 19th Century journals, including the Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
  • Manybooks.net : free access to over 27,000 e-books
  • The Online Books Page provides access to the texts of over 30,000 free books on the Web.
  • Open Library: Open Library's goal is "to list every book -- whether in-print or out-of-print, available at a bookstore or a library, scanned or typed in as text". It includes information about various editions of books and links to the full-text of older works such as Shakespeare's plays.
  • Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of free e-books. The collection provides access to more than 27,000 titles from the beginning of the 20th century and earlier. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use.
  • SCETI : Schoenberg Centre for Electronic Text and Image is a digital library created in 1996. Its mission is to make available to researchers, facsimiles of rare books in the Penn (Pennsylvania University) Library's collections. The collection offers over 12,000 digital images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music. The texts and images may be printed off and additional formats may be ordered for a charge.
  • VIRGObeta is a new service based at the University of Virginia giving access to digital texts and images. Note that the service is still in its testing phase and that while many of the texts are publicly available, others are only accessible to members of the University of Virginia.

General and specific sites on English literature

General

  • British Comparative Literature Association : the BCLA "aims to promote the scholarly study of literature without confinement to national or linguistic boundaries, and in relation to other disciplines."
  • English Subject Centre aims to promote quality learning and teaching of English Studies in UK higher education. The Centre runs workshops, conferences and other events and is involved in various projects and initiatives to support lecturers in English. Their website provides news of relevant government programmes and funding initiatives, details of events organised by the Centre, resources on teaching, a directory of experience and interests, and an email discussion board.

Poetry

  • The Poetry Archive is a new online collection which features recordings of poets reading their work. This free archive has been created by UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and recording producer Richard Carrington and currently contains almost 100 voices. Historic recordings of poets such as Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, Betjeman and Sassoon are included, as well as contemporary poets such as Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter. The organisers plan to record many more contemporary poets and also to track down more historic recordings. The text of each poem featured is also included on the site.
  • The Poetry Kit : a site providing information about poetry-related events, listings, magazines, articles and interviews.
  • The Poetry Society includes details of events.

Literary theory and criticism

Medieval and Renaissance literature

For more sites about the staging and performance of Shakespeare's plays, see the links for Drama and theatre

  • Elizabethan authors : texts, resources and authorship studies is an online full-text database created by Robert Brazil and Barboura Flues, providing resources for students and researchers of Renaissance literature. The site includes primary texts and realated resources.
  • The English Renaissance in context (ERIC) This Web site contains a set of tutorials on Shakespeare's plays and on the production and distribution of books during the early modern period. It also hold a database of scanned texts from the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania
  • From Stage to Page: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Produced by Professor Gerard NeCastro of the University of Maine at Machias, this web site gives access to NeCastro's own editions of numerous complete early English play texts, arranged in the following categories: Moral Comedies; Non-Cycle Plays; Medieval Mystery Cycle Plays; and Tudor Drama. The site includes texts such as the Chester cycle; York cycle; and Towneley cycle but also editions of rarer plays such as: 'Mundus et Infans' and 'Lucidus and Dubius'. Professor NeCastro authorises full use of the texts, but asks to be notified of their use.
  • Internet Shakespeare Edition is an online full-text database containing scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays and poems, as well as background information. The site also includes the Shakespeare in Performance database which provides performance materials from over 1000 film and stage productions related to Shakespeare's works.
  • Map of Early Modern London This site contains a facsimile of the Agas Map of London, originally created around 1560-1570, and now held in the Guildhall Library, London. The online map is interactive and is designed as a teaching tool for students of Renaissance English literature, drama and history. By clicking on sections of the map you can obtain related references, contemporary sources and other resources where these are available.
  • Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature Created and edited by Anniina Jokinen, this site is a wonderful resource for students of early English literature and literary history. It has four main collections of literary works and resources:
    • Medieval which includes links to the writings of Chaucer, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as well as an assortment of plays and lyrical works.
    • Renaissance which includes links to the works of More, Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare.
    • 17th Century includes links and resources on Bacon, Donne, Lovelace and Cowley.
    • Restoration includes authors such as Pepys, Dryden, Pope and Swift.

    The site also includes sections on 19th Century Literature, Contemporary Woman Writers and Irish Literature, Mythology, Folklore and Drama.

  • Origins of early modern literature : recovering mid-Tudor writing for a modern readership. This is an online catalogue produced by an AHRC-funded project covering English literary works published during the period 1519 - 1579. The catalogue provides details of titles, authors (including the authors of liminary material, such as prefaces and dedicatory poems), printers, booksellers, dedicatees, entries in the Stationers Register, the format in which books were published, and type faces and foreign languages used. It also contains a list of contents for each work, and information about genres, subjects, sources and literary coteries, as well as short essays on the context for each work.

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century literature

  • The British Association for Romantic Studies : as well as providing information about forthcoming events, research opportunities, and membership details, the site includes a selection of links to relevant Web resources.
  • The John Clare Page provides complete online editions of Clare's poems, many of which have been annotated, plus a sample of Clare's prose, 'Popularity in Authorship' (1824). The site includes a chronology of Clare's life and writing, a selection of portraits and engravings of the author, a detailed bibliography of Clare criticism and links to online articles and essays.
  • Romantic Circles : a site devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.
  • Victorian Women Writers Project : a substantial collection of full-text versions of, often obscure and inaccessible, works by British women writers of the Victorian period.

Modern and contemporary literature

  • Contemporary Writers.com : a searchable database that contains profiles of living UK and Commonwealth authors. Includes biographies, bibliographies, critical reviews and prizes.
  • The Samuel Beckett endpage produced by The Samuel Beckett Society.
  • British Library Theatre Archive project This website accompanies a major project to reinvestigate British theatre history 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both the theatregoer and the practitioner.

Scottish Literature

  • The Bottle Imp is a free full-text biannual e-zine which aims to promote and support the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language. The journal has been produced since spring 2007 and full-text of the current and back issues is available.
  • International Journal of Scottish Literature (IJSL) is a free full-text peer-reviewed online journal published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS). Its aim is to "develop and circulate international perspectives on Scottish writing". The journal has been produced since autumn 2006 and full-text of the current and back issues is available.
  • Scotland's pages : Scotland's written history This website is part of the National Library of Scotland's Digital Library, providing access to texts and resources relating to key events in Scottish history from 1000 onwards. The documents are all in English or in English translation and include manuscript and printed texts, many in facsimile.

Drama and theatre

  • BardCast: The Shakespeare Podcast
  • Designing Shakespeare is an audio-visual database which provides a wealth of information on the work of British theatre designers and a guide to the range of possible interpretations of Shakespeare's work. The database offers: a text database of production details and excerpts from theatre reviews which refer to design; an image database of production photographs; a collection of video interviews with a number of important designers; a collection of VRML models of the key theatres spaces in Stratford and London where Shakespeare has been performed.
  • Harold Pinter web site: the official website of the late British playright, director, actor, poet and political activist.
  • Harold Pinter entry on Wikipedia maintained by maintained by a leading Pinter scholar, Mark Taylor Batty.
  • In-yer-face theatre website maintained by Alek Sierz, the author of Sierz, A. (2001) In-yer-face theatre: British drama today. London: Faber. His website includes a profile of, and interview with, the playwright Mark Ravenhill
  • Mark Ravenhill interview about playwriting on the Open University web site.
  • Royal Court Theatre web site provides downloadable "education packs" about many of their productions and links to behind-the-scenes podcasts featuring Mark Ravenhill, David Hare, Debbie Tucker Green and many others.
  • Royal Shakespeare Company : Exploring Shakespeare is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Shakespeare performance. It includes images, clips from performances, interviews with directors, as well as background information on the writing and staging of Shakespeare's plays.
  • The Society for Theatre Research (STR) is a UK organisation interested in the history and techniques of the British theatre. The website provides information about all aspects of the society's activities. These include: organising lectures; publishing books, re-prints of texts and the 'Theatre Notebook' journal; an annual theatre book prize, awarded to examples of original research in British theatre; and a research fund which provides grants to "private scholars, theatre professionals, academic staff, and students, of any nationality".
  • Stage The Guardian Online's section on theatre including reviews, articles and discussions.
  • British Library Theatre Archive project This website accompanies a major project to reinvestigate British theatre history 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both the theatregoer and the practitioner.
  • The Victorian Plays Project provides a digital archive of selected plays from T.H. Lacy's 'Acting Edition of Victorian Plays (1848-1873)'. It includes The Ticket-of-Leave Man by Tom Taylor

Creative writing

  • Association for creative writing and English This website offers information and resources aimed at students and teachers of creative writing at all levels. It provides details of relevant creative writing workshops and masterclasses, programmes on teaching creative writing, celebrity reading events, publishing and competition opportunities and access to online journals.
  • CompletelyNovel is a new social network of readers, writers, literary agents and publishers. Based on the peer review principle, the site features discussion and debate and allows unpublished writers to upload manuscripts and tap into "a vibrant book-loving community of readers" which will establish whether their work is marketable. The writers can publish straight into paperback using PoD printers also on the site.

Literary prizes and events

Internet tutorials

If you are new to using the Internet, try an Internet tutorial which can teach you the basics of searching effectively:

  • The Library has set up a Brookes Virtual tutorial called Searching the web - Google and gateways to help you find out more about using search engines and gateways. To access this:
    • Go to the Brookes home page and select Brookes Virtual.
    • At the Brookes Virtual Gateway, click on the link for Self-Registration courses
    • Log into PIP as prompted
    • From the list of courses available, click the Register button for the course you want
    • On the next page to appear, click on the Register button
    • Click on the Go to the Brookes Virtual Gateway button
    • Log into the VLE and the tutorial will be available in your Courses List

  • Internet Detective Free Internet tutorial to help develop your skills in online research.
  • The Virtual Training Suite offers various free , "teach yourself" tutorials that allow you to practise your Internet Information Skills. These include an Internet Tutorial for English Studies.
  • TONIC the online netskills interactive course