Resources by Subject: Literature: finding books and texts

Finding Books and Electronic Texts
for Research in Literature
Online Catalogs
UW Libraries Catalog
Provides you with access to over 1.9 million titles between the Bothell, Seattle and Tacoma campuses. Use the Request button to recall books or request books from UW Seattle or Tacoma libraries. You can also limit your search to the UWB/CCC Campus Library.

Summit
Cooperative library catalog representing over 26 academic and college libraries in Washington and Oregon states. Note: UW Faculty, Staff, and Students can request items from any of these libraries by clicking on REQUEST THIS ITEM.

OCLC WorldCat - UW restricted
Union catalog to the major research libraries in the United States and abroad.

Literature Reference Sources
UWB/CCC Campus Library Reference Sources for Literature Research
Dissertations
Dissertation Abstracts - UW restricted
Citations to dissertations written at US universities from 1861 on. Includes abstracts for those written after 1980 plus some foreign dissertations. Note: UW Faculty, Staff, and Students can download copies of UW theses and dissertations for free.
Electronic Literature Sources - Poetry, Fiction, & Other Texts

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
Contains 52 works by African-American women published prior to 1920. Documents are browsable by title, author, or genre (fiction, poetry, biography, or essays); browse lists can be further searched by keywords.

African Writers Series
Contains key texts of modern African literature, including nearly 200 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose.

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry - UW restricted
Published by Columbia University Press, Granger's has long provided indexing to both poems and poetry in anthologies and other collections. The online version now provides the same access digitally. It also provides short poet biographies, a glossary of terms, and the full-text of the most frequently anthologized poems. Search by author, title, first and last line, or keyword.

Early English Books Online - UW restricted
"Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War." Contains over 125,000 works.

Google Book Search
Search the full text of books and view the full text online; search within the book; find it in your local library; or find reviews and related information.

Literature Online (LION) - UW restricted
 Fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 192 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.

MLA International Bibliography - UW restricted
 In addition to journal articles and dissertations, the MLA Bibliography also indexes articles and chapters from books.

Modern English Collection
From the University of Virginia Library, this online collection features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, manuscripts and illustrations from 1500 to the present.

Digital Archives of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Contains works by the following 19th-century American women writers: Lydia Marie Child, Ellen Craft, Rebecca Harding Davis, Eliza Lee Follen, Sarah Louisa Forten, Hannah F. Gould, Sarah Josepha Hale, Frances E. W. Harper, Rebekah Hyneman, Mrs. Edward Leigh, Confessions of a Flirt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth , Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert, and Harriet Wilson.

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Maintainer of this guide: Leslie Bussert, Ethics and Humanities Librarian