This library guide aims to provide library resources in the subject area of Pre - 20th Century African American Literature. Click on the folders above to access other relevant files.
Mastering Slavery
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In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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The text is that of the 1861 first edition. Contexts includes contemporary responses to Incidents, selections from Jacobs's other published writings, and extracts from her correspondence. Criticism includes eleven important assessments of the narrative, contributed by Jean Fagan Yellin, Ann Taves, Valerie Smith, Nellie Y. McKay, Harryette Mullen, Michelle Burnham, Nell Irvin Painter, Frances Smith Foster, Sandra Gunning, Elizabeth V. Spelman, and Christine Accomando. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.
Slave Narratives (LOA #114)
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The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage. Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Narrative of William W. Brown; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb; Narrative of Sojouner Truth; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green.
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies (LOA #68)
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the only authoritative edition of all three autobiographies by the escaped slave who becamea great American leader. Here in this Library of America volume are collected Frederick Douglass's three autobiographical narratives, now recognized as classics of both American history and American literature. Writing with the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made him a brilliantly effective spokesman for the abolition of slavery and equal rights, Douglass shapes an inspiring vision of self-realization in the face of monumental odds. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave(1845), published seven years after his escape, was written in part as a response to skeptics who refused to believe that so articulate an orator could ever have been a slave. A powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born, it brought him to the forefront of the anti-slavery movement and drew thousands, black and white, to the cause. InMy Bondage and My Freedom(1855), Douglass expands the account of his slave years. With astonishing psychological penetration, he probes the painful ambiguities and subtly corrosive effects of black-white relations under slavery, and recounts his determined resistance to segregation in the North. The book also incorporates extracts from Douglass's speeches, including the searing "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Life and Times, first published in 1881, records Douglass's efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality udirng Reconstruction. John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe all feature prominently in this chronicle of a crucial epoch in American history. The revised edition of 1893, presented here, includes an account of his controversial diplomatic mission to Haiti. This volume contains a detailed chronology of Douglass's life, notes providing further background on the events and people mentioned, and an account of the textual history of each of the autobiographies. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Voices of the Old South
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Spanning the period from the earliest European expeditions to the eve of the Civil War, Voices of the Old South assembles a fascinating array of firsthand perspectives on the great events that shaped the region as well as its customs, attitudes, and commonplace occurrences. Encompassing key themes in southern history, the eyewitness accounts Alan Gallay has brought together for this volume are remarkable in their variety. In addition, Gallay's selections reflect a multicultural approach in which African Americans, native Americans, and women are treated not as mere tokens but as major participants in southern life. Unlike many works on the Old South, which tend to focus on the immediate pre-war years, this volume gives equal attention to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Its geographic definition of the region is notably broad, including not only British America but also French Louisiana, the mountain areas as well as the lowlands, the pine barrens and the cotton belt. While famous names--such as Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Frances Anne Kemble--can be found here, Gallay also features writings by a number of obscure or less familiar figures. A French carpenter's account of an ill-fated expedition in Florida, a Scottish tradesman's description of the social mores of Georgia and the Carolinas, a free black's journal of daily life in Natchez, Mississippi--these are but a few of the rare and unusual documents excerpted in the book. In his introduction, Gallay explains the diversity of his selections, contending that to identify common threads among particular groups is not enough: we must also understand how the common threads take different forms when they penetrate different subcultures. By allowing the reader to listen to the richly divergent voices of those who lived in or visited the Old South, this collection suggests some fruitful ways of reaching that understanding.
Fugitive Vision
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Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early black literature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literary representations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacy for current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration that subvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists. From a portrait of Douglass's mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophesy on Dave the Potter's ceramics, the book identifies a "fugitive vision" that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.
Fettered Genius
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In Fettered Genius, Keith D. Leonard identifies how African American poets' use and revision of traditional poetics constituted an antiracist political agency. Comparing this practice to the use of poetic mastery by the ancient Celtic bards to resist British imperialism, Leonard shows how traditional poetics enable African American poets to insert racial experience, racial protest, and African American culture into public discourse by making them features of validated artistic expression. As with the Celtic bards, these poets' artistry testified to their marginalized people's capacity for imagination and reason within and against the terms of the dominant culture. In an ambitious survey that moves from slavery to the cultural nationalism of the 1960s, Leonard examines numerous poets, placing each in the context of his or her time to demonstrate the antiracist meaning of their accomplishments. The book offers new insight on the conservatism of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the genteel members of the Harlem Renaissance, how their rage for assimilation functioned to refute racist notions of difference and, paradoxically, to affirm a distinctive racial experience as valid material for poetry. Leonard also demonstrates how the more progressive and ethnically distinctive poetics of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson share some of the same ambivalence about cultural achievement as those of the earlier poets. They also have in common the self-conscious pursuit of an affirmation of the African American self through the substitution of African American vernacular language and cultural forms for traditional poetic themes and forms. The evolution of these poetics parallels the emergence of notions of ethnic identity over racial identity and, indeed, in some ways even motivated this shift. Leonard recognizes poetic mastery as the African American bardic poet's most powerful claim of ethnic tradition and of social belonging and clarifies the full hybrid complexity of African American identity that makes possible this political self-assertion. The development that is traced in Fettered Genius illustrates nothing less than the defining artistic coherence and political significance of the African American poetic tradition.
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative
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The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. This Companion examines the slave narrative's relation to British and American abolitionism, Anglo-American literary traditions such as autobiography and sentimental literature, and the larger African American literary tradition. Special attention is paid to leading exponents of the genre such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as many other, less well known examples. Further essays explore the rediscovery of the slave narrative and its subsequent critical reception, as well as the uses to which the genre is put by modern authors such as Toni Morrison. With its chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion provides both an easy entry point for students new to the subject and comprehensive coverage and original insights for scholars in the field.
The Earliest African American Literatures
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With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief introductions preceding each text provide historical context and genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.
Before Harlem
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Despite important recovery and authentication efforts during the last twenty-five years, the vast majority of nineteenth-century African American writers and their work remain unknown to today's readers. Moreover, the most widely used anthologies of black writing have established a canon based largely on current interests and priorities. Seeking to establish a broader perspective, this collection brings together a wealth of autobiographical writings, fiction, poetry, speeches, sermons, essays, and journalism that better portrays the intellectual and cultural debates, social and political struggles, and community publications and institutions that nurtured black writers from the early 1800s to the eve of the Harlem Renaissance. As editor Ajuan Mance notes, previous collections have focused mainly on writing that found a significant audience among white readers. Consequently, authors whose work appeared in African American-owned publications for a primarily black audience--such as Solomon G. Brown, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and T. Thomas Fortune--have faded from memory. Even figures as celebrated as Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar are today much better known for their "cross-racial" writings than for the larger bodies of work they produced for a mostly African American readership. There has also been a tendency in modern canon making, especially in the genre of autobiography, to stress antebellum writing rather than writings produced after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Similarly, religious writings--despite the centrality of the church in the everyday lives of black readers and the interconnectedness of black spiritual and intellectual life--have not received the emphasis they deserve. Filling those critical gaps with a selection of 143 works by 65 writers, Before Harlem presents as never before an in-depth picture of the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century African America and will be a valuable resource for a new generation of readers.
Twelve Years a Slave
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Now the major motion picture that won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starringChiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, andLupita Nyong'o, and directed by Steve McQueen Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives,Twelve Years a Slaveis a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.
Written by Herself
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..".substantial contribution to African-American Studies and women s studies." Mississippi Quarterly "A bravura performance by an accomplished scholar... it strikes a perfect balance between insightful literary analysis and historical investigation." Eighteenth-Century Studies ..". an impressive study of a wide range of writers.... Foster s work is both scholarly and accessible. Her prose is economical and direct, making this book enjoyable as well as instructive." Belles Lettres ..". an impressively wide-ranging discussion of texts and contexts... " Signs "Foster has written a fine book that provides the reader with a context for understanding the importance of the written word for women who chose to set the record straight ." Journal of American History ..". fascinating, meticulously researched... Likely to prove seminal in the field... highly recommended... " Library Journal "Written by Herself comprises a volume of remarkable female characters whose desires for social change often made them catalysts for spiritual awakening in their own times." MultiCultural Review ..". an outstanding piece of scholarship... Foster s book offers deeply intelligent, provocative, totally accessible analysis of a tradition and of writers still not sufficiently read and taught." American Literature "Well written and thoroughly researched. Highly recommended... " Choice The first comprehensive cultural history of literature by African American women prior to the 20th century. From the oral histories of Alice, a slave born in 1686, to the literary tradition that included Jarena Lee and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, this literature was argument, designed to correct or to instruct an audience often ignorant about or even hostile to black women."
Poems of Cabin and Field
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The deserted plantation -- Hunting song -- Little brown baby -- Chris'mus is a-comin' -- Signs of the times -- Time to tinker 'round -- Lullaby -- A banjo song
African-American Literature
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These brief anthologies of ethnic American literature are ideal for ethnic, multicultural and American literature courses. They are designed to introduce undergraduates to the rich but often neglected literary contributions of established and newer ethnic writers to American literature. Each text is organized chronologically by genre and represent a wide range of literature.
The Origins of African American Literature
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From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation. Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole. Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.
The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U. S. South
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The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.
The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
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An anthology of the work of 120 writers spanning two centuries, this book covers the earliest known work by an African American, Lucy Terry's poem Bars Fight, to the writing of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Poet Laureate Rita Dove. It begins with blues, gospel, spirituals, rap, sermons, prayers, testimonies and speeches, and continues with writing of all genres: poetry, short fiction, novels, drama, autobiography, journals and letters, including the full text of 11 major works.
African American Literature in Transition 1750-1800
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This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective--in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections - Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature - examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.
American Literature in Transition: Volume 2, 1820-1860
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The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.
African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830: Volume 2, 1800-1830
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African American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form.
African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880: Volume 5, 1865-1880
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This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.
African American Literature in Transition
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The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.
African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850: Volume 3
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This volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850, and showcases work that explores how African American literature and lived experiences shaped one another. Chapters focus on the interplay between pivotal political and social events, including emancipation in the West Indies, the Irish Famine, and the Fugitive Slave Act, and key African American cultural productions, such as the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the writings of David Walker, and the genre of the Slave Narrative. Chapters also examine the relationship between African American literature and a variety of institutions including, the press, and the post office. The chapters are grouped together in three sections, each of which is focused on transitions within a particular geographic scale: the local, the national, and the transnational. Taken together, they offer a crucial account of how African Americans used the written word to respond to and drive the events and institutions of the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.
Who Writes for Black Children?
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Until recently, scholars believed that African American children's literature did not exist before 1900. Now, Who Writes for Black Children? opens the door to a rich archive of largely overlooked literature read by black children. This volume's combination of analytic essays, bibliographic materials, and primary texts offers alternative histories for early African American literary studies and children's literature studies. From poetry written by a slave for a plantation school to joyful "death biographies" of African Americans in the antebellum North to literature penned by African American children themselves, Who Writes for Black Children? presents compelling new definitions of both African American literature and children's literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane bring together a rich collection of essays that argue for children as an integral part of the nineteenth-century black community and offer alternative ways to look at the relationship between children and adults. Including two bibliographic essays that provide a list of texts for future research as well as an extensive selection of hard-to-find primary texts, Who Writes for Black Children? broadens our ideas of authorship, originality, identity, and political formations. In the process, the volume adds new texts to the canon of African American literature while providing a fresh perspective on our desire for the literary origin stories that create canons in the first place. Contributors: Karen Chandler, U of Louisville; Martha J. Cutter, U of Connecticut; LuElla D'Amico, Whitworth U; Brigitte Fielder, U of Wisconsin-Madison; Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State U; Mary Niall Mitchell, U of New Orleans; Angela Sorby, Marquette U; Ivy Linton Stabell, Iona College; Valentina K. Tikoff, DePaul U; Laura Wasowicz; Courtney Weikle-Mills, U of Pittsburgh; Nazera Sadiq Wright, U of Kentucky.
Selected Research Databases for African American Literature:
Here are some selected databases that will help you in your research in the subject area of African American Literature. Click on title links to get access to relevant research databases available at the University Libraries. Please enter your user name (first name and last) and Rocket ID with the 'R' to get off-campus access to the Research Databases.
Comprehensive index to worldwide scholarly literature on modern languages, linguistics, literature, and folklore.
Index to journals, books, and other publications and works in the humanities disciplines.
Contains information on thousands of authors and their works covering all literary disciplines and timeframes. Includes author biographies and interviews, plot summaries, literary criticism and book reviews. Also contains thousands of full-text literary works, such as plays, poems, short stories and classic novels, and several full-text literary reference books.
Guide originally created by Suhasini Kumar (retired, 2017).
