Subject Guides: English and Related Literature: Twentieth Century

Primary sources

The following databases and websites can be used to find primary sources.

Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
This collaboration between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading) and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin) reunites the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works in a digital way by bringing together digital facsimiles of documents from different libraries, and adding transcriptions of Beckett's manuscripts, tools for bilingual and genetic version comparison, a search engine, and an analysis of the textual genesis of his works.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (Alexander Street)
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries is a major collection of diaries and correspondence spanning more than 400 years and giving access to the personal experiences of nearly 500 women. It contains around 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries and over 4,000 facsimile pages of previously unpublished manuscripts. Letters and diaries of famous historic and literary figures can be found alongside the thoughts and experiences of ordinary women, including the unpublished letters and diaries of women who served during both world wars. The texts themselves are accompanied by biographies of the authors and bibliographic details of the sources.

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Gerritsen Women's History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs (ProQuest)
More than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand.

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Guardian, 1821-2003 and Observer, 1791-2003 (ProQuest)
The Guardian from 2004 onward is also available via YorSearch.
The Observer from 2004 onward is also available via YorSearch.
A full text archive of page and article facsimile images of the Guardian (1821 - 2003) and the Observer (1791 - 2003).

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Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003
The complete facsimile archive of the Illustrated London News, the worlds first fully illustrated weekly newspaper published between 1842 and 2003. The archive includes over 260,000 pages of text and more than 1.5 million full colour images.

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Irish Times, 1859 onwards (excluding the most recent 2 years) and Weekly Irish Times, 1876 - 1958 (ProQuest)
The Irish Times current content is also available via YorSearch.
A full text archive of page and article facsimile images of The Irish Times (1859 onwards, excluding the most recent 2 years) and The Weekly Irish Times (1876 - 1958). Coverage includes The Times Pictorial.

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Nexis
Personalisation is available via the link above.

Alternative link without personalisation if you have problems with the link above (please clear the cookies and cache in your browser): Nexis.
Nexis is a major source of global news and business information. It provides full-text access to over 34,000 publications, with more than 12,000 news sources including UK daily and regional newspapers, current affairs magazines, and professional journals. Updated daily; back issues archive varies by title.

Nexis also includes 80 sources of company information, plus thousands of biographies of government officials, politicians, celebrities, investors and business contacts.

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Past Masters - English Letters
A full text collection of the correspondence, diaries, memoirs and notebooks from many of the most distinguished writers, statesmen, scientists, churchmen, explorers and philosophers in British history.
Times Digital Archive, 1785 - 2019
A full-image archive of every page published by The Times (London) from 1785 until 2019. The text within the images is fully searchable at the article level.

For The Times from 2020 onwards see the entry: Times 1985 - present.

For help with this resource, take a look at our Quick Guide.

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Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, 1902 - 2014
Some Times Literary Supplement content from 2015 onward is also available via YorSearch.
This fully-searchable full colour facsimile edition of the TLS includes every page of every copy published from 1902 until 2014.

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Times of India, 1838 onwards (excluding the most recent 9 years) (ProQuest)
Times of India current content is also available via YorSearch.
A full text archive of page and article facsimile images of The Times of India from 1838 onwards (excluding the most recent 9 years).

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W. B. Yeats Collection (ProQuest)
The major works of W.B. Yeats in all genres, including poetry, plays, criticism and fiction, published between 1885 and 1995.

A single edition of each work, usually the last known to have been approved by Yeats, has been included. However, both of the widely different versions of A Vision (1925 and 1937) have been included.

Where available, the scholarly editions in the Scribner/Macmillan Collected Edition of the Works of W.B. Yeats have been used. For works excluded from or not yet published in the Collected Edition, the best available text has been used, including other scholarly editions and texts prepared after Yeats's death with the assistance of his widow, George Yeats.

The entire text of each work has been included. Any accompanying text written by the author and forming an integral part of the work has been keyed. Indexes of titles and first lines have been excluded. Any images appearing in the text have been included.
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Web of Stories
Formerly known as: Peoples Archive
An archive of online movies featuring detailed life stories of the world's greatest thinkers, creators and achievers narrated in one-to-one interviews. The life stories are arranged into seven sections covering Arts, Film, Literature, Masters, Medicine, Politics and Science and are accompanied by transcripts with complete bibliographies or filmographies, external links to relevant websites and illustrations. Web of Stories is a dynamic resource with new life stories contiually being added.

Woolf Online
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A digital archive of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927)
The site is intended to serve as a resource for research and study of Woolf's modernist classic. On this site you will find images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), the typescripts, the proofs, and various early editions of the novel, including the first British and American editions and their variants. Also included is a wealth of contextual materials, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of the novel, selected essays Woolf wrote during the two- year period during which she worked on To the Lighthouse, and photographs of the Stephen family, Cornwall, and Talland House, all of which inform the setting and characters of the novel. .

Secondary sources

The following databases and websites can be used to find secondary sources.

First World War Poetry Digital Archive
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is a collection of around 13,500 digital images, film and audio items many of which are rare primary source material.
JSTOR
For alumni access please see the Virtual Library JSTOR section on Alumni Learning.
A digital archive collection of core scholarly journals starting with the first issues (many of which date from the 1800s). See JSTOR's online help guide for further information.

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LION - Literature Online
This resource is a searchable, online library of over 300,000 works of English and American poetry, prose and drama. It also provides access to a growing collection of online journals, reference works, author biographies and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL).

For help with this resource, take a look at our Quick Guide.

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Performing Arts Periodicals Database (ProQuest)
Formerly International Index to Performing Arts Full Text
A major database of the journal literature on the performing arts and covers a broad range of areas including dance, film, television, drama, theatre, stagecraft, musical theatre, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, comedy, broadcast arts and performance art. Performing Arts Periodicals Database includes indexing and abstracts for more than 240 international titles and the full text of articles from over 80 journals.

For help with this resource, take a look at our Quick Guide.

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Project MUSE
Project MUSE, founded by Johns Hopkins University Press, is a database of over 380 full text scholarly journals in the arts, humanities and social sciences from over 70 (mainly university press) publishers.

For help with this resource, take a look at our Quick Guide.

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Web of Science
Web of Science provides access to the Science Citation Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

For help with this resource, take a look at our Quick Guide.

For help using this resource for bibliometrics see Bibliometrics: a practical guide.

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Journals

The following databases and websites can be used to find journal articles.

American literary history
Covers the study of US literature from its origins through the present, and provides a forum for the various voices of contemporary literary inquiry. The journal welcomes articles on historical and theoretical problems as well as writers and works.
Modern fiction studies
Publishes essays on all aspects of modern and contemporary fiction welcoming theoretical perspectives; we are equally interested in work on canonical texts and work on emergent texts.
Narrative
Narrative's broad range of scholarship includes the English, American, and European novel, nonfiction narrative, film, and narrative as used in performance art.
New literary history
New Literary History focuses on questions of theory, method, interpretation, and literary history. Rather than espousing a single ideology or intellectual framework, it canvasses a wide range of scholarly concerns. By examining the bases of criticism, the journal provokes debate on the relations between literary and cultural texts and present needs.
Poetics today
Poetics Today brings together scholars who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works.
Twentieth century literature
Scholarly essays on any aspect of literature written in the twentieth century.

English and Related Literature

Twentieth Century

Twentieth Century Resources

Primary sources

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Secondary Sources

Journals

Journals