Library Guides: Literature in English: Twentieth-Century Literature

Useful Digital Collections

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1920– (Chadwyck-Healey)
The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature contains 880,000 records, covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards.
The Faber Poetry Library (Chadwyck-Healey)
A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of Thom Gunn, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.
Twentieth-Century Drama (Chadwyck-Healey)
Bringing together an unparalleled collection of the most important works from the last century from the English-speaking world, Twentieth Century Drama is the essential resource for the study and research of the drama of this influential period.
more...less...
Featuring plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists, the collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Neil Simon, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong.

American Literature

Twentieth-Century African American Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey)
A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.
Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey)
This unparalleled collection includes 50,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Andrei Codrescu, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Cathy Song.

Asian American Drama This link opens in a new window
Plays by Asian American playwrights from the late 19th century to the present.
Includes the complete text of more than 250 plays, from the late 19th century to the present, representing the various ethnicities within the Asian American community including works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian and Malaysian ancestry. Also includes biographical, production and theatrical information.

English and Irish Literature

W.B. Yeats Collection This link opens in a new window
The major works of W.B. Yeats.
Contains the major work of W.B. Yeats in all genres, including poetry, plays, criticism and fiction published between 1885 and 1995, collected in 22 volumes. Also includes images that appeared in the text.Part of the Literature Online collection.
Beckett Digital Manuscript Project This link opens in a new window
Digitized collection of Irish author Samuel Beckett's original manuscripts, as well as a digitized collection of his personal library with his annotations. Beckett wrote in both English and French.
The purpose of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is to reunite the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works in a digital way, and to facilitate genetic research: the project brings together digital facsimiles of documents that are now preserved in different holding libraries, and adds 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.

Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey)
A collection of more than 600 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Thom Gunn, Fleur Adcock, Paul Muldoon, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library.

World Literature

African Writers Series This link opens in a new window
Works from the canon of African 20th century literature including stories, drama, poetry and other literary works.
The Heinemann's African Writer Series includes works from the canon of African 20th century literature including stories, drama, poetry and other literary works.

Digital Collections: Broad Time Span

American Fiction, 1774-1920 This link opens in a new window
Digitized, full text prose fiction written by Americans from colonial times to the early twentieth century. More than 17,800 titles.
The titles to the year 1900 include nearly all of the works found in Lyle H. Wright’s American Fiction: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography. Wright’s three-volume set—American Fiction, 1774–1850; American Fiction, 1851–1875; and American Fiction, 1876–1900—is widely considered the most comprehensive bibliography of American adult prose fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [1774-1920]

English Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey)
The original ground-breaking Chadwyck-Healey collection, English Poetry contains essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets are drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.
English Poetry, Second Edition (Chadwyck-Healey)
English Poetry, Second Edition contains over 183,000 poems, essentially comprising the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th. Drawn from nearly 4,900 printed sources, more than 2,700 poets are represented. English Poetry, Second Edition redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection with the addition of more than 20,000 poems from several new categories.
Bibliography of American Literature (Chadwyck-Healey)
Recognised as one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century scholarship, the Bibliography of American Literature describes in exhaustive detail the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to 1930. More than 37,000 works are listed, essentially the complete printed record of American literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Project on the History of Black Writing: Novel Collection
List of well-known and lesser-known novels by African American writers from 1800-1990.

Rotunda Literature and Culture This link opens in a new window
"Digital editions of selected American and British literary texts that include scholarly features such as critical commentary, annotations, scans of original texts, and layered drafts for comparison."
"Digital texts include ""Clotel"" by William Wells Brown: An Electronic Scholarly Edition; Emily Dickinson's Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry; Herman Melville's ""Typee"": A Fluid Text Edition; Journal of Emily Shore: Revised and Expanded; The Digital Temple: A Documentary Edition of George Herbert's English Verse; The Letters of Christina Rossetti: A Digital Edition; The Letters of Matthew Arnold"
Black Drama, 2nd edition This link opens in a new window
Full text of plays by hundreds of black playwrights, as well as information on related productions, theaters, production companies, selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. [1850 - present]
Contains almost 1,500 plays by more than 200 playwrights. Includes information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. The plays have been selected using leading bibliographies and with the editorial advice of James V. Hatch, co-author with Errol G. Hill of A History of African American Theatre. Complements the other Alexander Street Press database Black Drama,(first edition).
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Plays, prose and poetry by Latin writers. (1850 - present)
Contains approximately 380 plays and 67,500 pages of prose and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States.
North American Women's Drama This link opens in a new window
Full text of plays, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies in the U.S. and Canada. (North American Womens Drama) [1714 - present]
Full text of over 1,500 plays written by 275 playwrights women since Colonial times in the U.S. and Canada with approximately one-quarter of the collection never before published. Allows searching by author, play title, character, scenes, and more. Also includes related biographical, theatrical and production information.
Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Digitized collection of original manuscript and printed documents from around the world to support research in the field of colonial and empire studies. [1492-1962]
Includes 70,000 images of original manuscript and printed documents to support study and research in the field of colonial and empire studies. Five sections include: Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, c. 1607-1969. In addition to original documents, this database contains scholarly essays and analysis.

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Online access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more.

Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History This link opens in a new window
Hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century.
Voyages by rail, road, sea and air are all covered as are walking, cycling and even a journey by stagecoach. Some items are relatively brief such as the record of a car journey when cars were relatively new, which records the places that were passed through, the weather and the road conditions. Others are daily journals which describe long tours of Europe, where all the details of the trip are meticulously recorded. Then there are scrapbooks containing fantastic visual material such as photographs, postcards, cuttings and sketches and other ephemera.

Secondary menu

Literature in English

Useful Digital Collections

American Literature

English and Irish Literature

World Literature

Digital Collections: Broad Time Span