Literature: American Online Resources
This guide will assist you in doing research in the fields of American and English Literature.
Professional Associations
Here are literary associations and organizations that may be of interest to you:
International Society for the Study of Narrative
Check out the section on Wikis and Teaching Resources- List of literary societies and professional associations whose purposes are closely related to those of the MLA. Enter an author in the search box to see if there is an association related to him/her.
American Literature Blogs
- “An almost-daily celebration of important (and not so important)
dates in 19th-century American literary history.” - Reviews and critiques of international novels.
New York Public Library Blog Posts
Blog posts by subject: English and American Literature.
American Literature Twitter Accounts
- American Literature“Short Stories and Classic Literature for teachers, students, readers and writers. Don’t miss the Short Story of the Day.”
- Dead Authors on Twitter“The writers themselves may no longer be with us, but clever fans are impersonating them on Twitter, imagining what the scribes would have said if they’d had access to the microblogging service. Here are the best dead author Twitter accounts we could find.”
American Literature Podcasts
American Literature Websites
Here are some links that will help you as you research American literature: authors, works, and literary criticism. These are aggregate sites as opposed to sites devoted to individual authors.
- Authors are chronically arranged and links to their works are provided.
- Richard Horwitz, Professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa, has compiled this very useful cross-disciplinary list of recommended links in an easy-to-use tabbed format.
Bartleby.com: Great Books Online
Publishes literature, reference, and verse. Provides students with unlimited free access to books and information on the web.Cambridge History of English and American Literature
Considered the most important work of literary history and criticism ever published, the Cambridge History contains over 303 chapters and 11,000 pages, with essay topics ranging from poetry, fiction, drama and essays to history, theology and political writing.- Digital Book Index provides links to more than 155,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. More than 135,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost.
Documenting the American South
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.Ernest Hemingway: Seven Tips on How to Write Fiction
Excerpts from the book, “Ernest Hemingway on Writing.”F. Scott Fitzgerald: Seven Tips on How to Write Fiction
Advice from F. Scott Fitzgerald to aspiring fiction writers.- Listen to Flannery O’Connor reads excerpts from an essay.
Internet Public Library: Literary Criticism
Although ipl2 is no longer updated, the ipl2 Literary Criticism Collection contains critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by nationality and literary period.John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer
Advice from John Steinbeck to aspiring writers and a film clip of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.- Open access to over 4,300 electronic journals.
- This easy-to-navigate site maintains a collection of annotated links on 19th-century British and 20th century British and American writers.
Shmoop: Study Guides and Teacher Resources
Smart, fresh guides to great literature by Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley PhD students.SSAWW (Society for the Study of American Women Writers)
This major site features links from the journal Legacy, pictures of American women writers, online texts, and other resources.- Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.
- Celebrating and documenting the creativity of Asian, Black, Latina, and Native women, VG is one of the internet’s most comprehensive and well-respected academic databases for women artists of color.
William Faulkner: Seven Tips on How to Write Fiction
Advice from William Faulkner to aspiring fiction writers.