Thousands of Oxford Univ. Press books available online!

The ISU e-Library has recently made available electronically thousands of scholarly monographs published by Oxford University Press. A quick link to the home page is here. A quick breakdown by subject:

Linguistics – 181 books

Literature – 633 books.

This collection will keep growing over time. For the time being, the collection can be searched/browsed by going to the above link. In time, the titles will be incorporated into the e-Library’s QuickSearch database, but that will take some doing.

 

Here are a few examples:

• Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek. Print publication date: 2011. Published in Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012.
• World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction by Jon Hegglund. Print publication date: 2012. Published in Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012.

 

Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly – New Journal available electronically

I’m pleased to announce that we now have electronic access to Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, starting with vol. 45, no. 1 (2011). The easiest way to get access to the journal is to go to the e-Library homepage, click on Journals which is pretty much in the center of the screen, and do a search on “Blake” clicking the radio button for “Exact.” Unfortunately this is one of the infinitesimally small number of e-journals that can only be accessed within the physical confines of the ISU campus.

 

According to the journal’s mission statement,

it’s a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to William Blake (1757-1827), the British poet, engraver, artist, and his circle. We publish articles, notes, book reviews, as well as two annual features: a review of sales of original works by Blake and his followers, and a checklist of publications on Blake.

Click here for more information about the journal’s history. An index of all articles published in Blake since the journal’s inception can be found here. The back issues, according to the journal’s website, will gradually be scanned in and made available in a searchable format, but for now all we have access to are issues from 2011 and forward. If you have at least a passing interest in Blakeana, the journal is worth a look.

Victoria Research Web

The Victoria Research Web (http://www.victorianresearch.org/) boasts an impressive wealth of material related to the study of Victorian-era literature. Overseen by the scholar Patrick Leary, “[T]he VRW is dedicated to the scholarly study of nineteenth-century Britain, and to aiding researchers, teachers, and students in their investigations of any and all aspects of this fascinating period.” It grew out of the e-mail listserv VICTORIA, and contains a database that allows for the searching of the VICTORIA listserv archives.

Within the VRW, you can find the full-text of the 10th edition (July, 2010) of Rosemary VanArdel’s Victorian Periodicals: Aids to Research: A Selected Bibliography, originally published in 1999, Eileen Curran’s Additions to and Corrections of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, and perhaps most significantly, At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901. The latter, created and maintained by Troy Bassett of Indiana University – Purdue  University Fort Wayne, includes (taken from the opening webpage):

• All multi-volume novels from The English Catalogue of Books, Volume I-V
• All multi-volume novels from the British Library Integrated Catalogue
• Biographical entries for over 100 authors
• Links to Google Books for over 150 titles
• Serialization information from over 100 periodicals, including All the Year Round, Belgravia, Blackwood’s Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, Fortnightly Review, The Manchester Weekly Times, Temple Bar, and Tinsley’s Magazine

Additionally, the VRW contains many other resources to aid students and scholars in finding research materials covering literary works from the Victorian era. Highly recommended for use in conjunction with the MLA International Bibliography database.

British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832

“An electronic collection of texts from the University of California, Davis,” this is a project that began with the scanning of content in 1998, and has grown ever since. The stated goal of the project:

“The British Women Romantic Poet’s Project is producing an online scholarly archive consisting of E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women written (not necessarily published) between 1789 (the onset of the French Revolution) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Act), a period traditionally known in English literary history as the Romantic period.”

Unfortunately, there’s no indication of how many authors and/or works are represented, and the project update page hasn’t been updated in ten years (!) but it remains an impressive collection. You can browse the list of authors alphabetically, or search by title, author, or creation (not publication!) date.

 

To go to the British Women Romantic Poets site, click here.