Literature Online is the leading online resource for the study and teaching of literature in English. It is a fully integrated service that combines the texts of over 357,250 works of literature with huge resources of criticism and reference.

Literature Online contains a full library of up-to-date, fully searchable criticism and reference resources in addition to the full text of poetry, drama, and prose fiction from the seventh century to the present day. It not only provides the materials for the historical study of almost every period and genre of literature in English but also features increasing numbers of works by the major authors of the twentieth century. Contemporary criticism is available through the full text of over 213 current literature journals that can be accessed through the renowned literary index, Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), which contains over 880,000 records of literary criticism from 1920 to current.

Undergraduates can also find explanations, definitions, and contextual material through a cross-searchable reference shelf that incorporates key academic textbooks such as The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms and The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Further bibliographic, biographical, and secondary information sources provide lists of works, author information, and narrative biographies. Literature Online makes rare and inaccessible works available alongside the established corpus, assists in undergraduate study and the design of courses, answers questions from the elementary to the sophisticated, and creates opportunities for new forms of study, analysis, and teaching.

Every work in Literature Online is provided in fully searchable SGML format, and can be searched in its own right or in combination with hundreds of other works from the same or from different genres. You can refine searches by adding elements from a range of criteria, including author's name, nationality, keyword, publication date, literary movement, literary period, and gender. You can also search the author information to find answers to questions such as: Who wrote The Lord of the Rings? Which authors were in Virginia Woolf's literary circle, The Bloomsbury Group? What African writers were influential in the 20th century? Which women authors were part of the HarlemRenaissance? What is the latest literary criticism on Hispanic American writers?

Literature Online expands coverage by offering over 5,250 hyperlinks to other sites on the Web that are relevant to the study of literature. These sites contain a broad range of useful materials--from further texts of literary works, to information on individual authors, to discussion groups devoted to literary topics.

Literature Online is dynamic, growing regularly as new texts are converted to electronic form, as new reference resources are added, and as further websites are identified and integrated within the service. The content of the service is developed with the advice of internationally known scholars, making Literature Online a complete environment for research, teaching, and undergraduate study.

Literature Online now includes multimedia to support poetry study.  PoetsOnScreen offers a growing collection of video clips which currently includes 839 filmed poetry readings of contemporary poets reading their poems and classic poems.

Literature Online brings together the contents of the following individual databases:

20th Century African-American Poetry--10,000 poems by more than 75 critically acclaimed African-American poets

20th Century American Poetry--More than 52,000 poems from over 750 20th-century American poets

20th Century English Poetry--More than 44,900 poems by over 285 authors in 598 volumes of poetry

African-American Poetry, 1760-1900--Nearly 3,000 poems written by African-American poets in the late 18th and 19th centuries

American Drama, 1714-1915—Over 1,500 plays from the beginning of American theater to the early twentieth century

American Poetry--Over 40,000 poems from more than 200 American poets

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) --Includes more than 780,000 bibliographic records from 1920 to current

Canadian Poetry --Created in partnership with the University of New Brunswick.  When complete it will include nearly 20,000 poems from the 17th century through the early 20th century.

Early American Fiction, 1789-1875—More than 750 complete works of fiction by more than 130 authors, the canon of early American literature

Early English Prose Fiction 1500-1700--Over 200 complete works of fiction from 1500-1700

Eighteenth-Century Fiction--96 complete works of fiction by writers from the British Isles from 1700-1780

English Drama (1280-1915)--Combination of English Prose Drama and English Verse Drama, which offers 4,000 plays by 1,200 authors from the late 13th century to the early 20th century

English Poetry--Essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th.  Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources

The Faber Poetry Library--The works of 50 of the most influential poets of the 20th century, including Sylvia Plath, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney

King James Bible--This version of the Bible was the standard edition of the Bible for nearly three centuries and offers a Bible for reference

Nineteenth-Century Fiction--250 complete novels from 1781 to 1903, including Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, as well as landmarks of Gothic and other Romantic period fiction

Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged--This 1993 edition offers 450,000 vocabulary entries

The following special collections are available as a subscription or purchase in addition to Literature Online:

The Bible in English--20 different versions of the English Bible from the 10th to the 20th centuries

Bibliography of American Literature (BAL)--Bibliographic information on almost 40,000 American literary works by 300 American writers from the period of the Revolution to 1930, recorded in the BAL's nine volumes

Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare--The complete text of 11 major editions, 24 separate contemporary printings of individual plays, more than 100 adaptations from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries

Literary Theory--Literary theory and criticism from Plato to the present day, with over 800 works by more than 350 writers

The W.B. Yeats Collection--Yeats's complete works in electronic form

Twentieth Century Drama – 2,500 global plays written in English from the most significant dramatists of the 20^th century.  Fully inclusive, it offers a comprehensive collection of women and men writers, all ethnicities and many nationalities.

African Writers Series – the digital version of the famous Heinneman African Writers Series, this collection brings forth virtually the canon of African writing – novels, short stories, poems, and plays – of the modern era.  Over 300 complete volumes from the original series, now mostly out of print, are offered, with final completion due in 2006.