What's New?

Literature Online is updated at least nine times a year; this page highlights new and forthcoming additions to our primary texts and full-text journal collections, together with information on new and revised biographies, new websites and key feature enhancements.

For a month-by-month summary of new content and features that have been added to the service since December 1996, see our Version History page.

New Biographies

The latest release of Literature Online sees the addition of 22 new or revised biographies, including biographies for John Arden, Kamau Brathwaite, Brian Catling, Constantine Cavafy and Adrienne Rich. Literature Online now contains over 4,500 biographies. Author biographies are specially commissioned for Literature Online, and give an authoritative and accessible overview of the author's life, work and critical reception. These biographies can be found by following links from Author Pages, by using Search: Criticism & Reference, or simply by entering an author's name in Quick Search.

Literature Online now contains over 19,000 author records. Each of our author records contains at least one of the following: an authoritative and accessible biography, full-text of the author's works, a comprehensive bibliography of primary works or a list of full-text critical and reference materials relating to the author. Author records can be accessed by searching in the Search: Authors or Search: Texts pages or from the Quick Search feature from any page.

[27 April 2012]

Further Companions to Literature volumes

This release of Literature Online now includes the first batch of volumes from the Companions to Literature series from Cambridge University Press. Over 110 volumes from this acclaimed series of critical texts, containing more than 1,700 individual essays, are now fully searchable and readable alongside Literature Online’s extensive collection of full-text journals.

To access this content you can search via the Criticism search page or browse a list of volumes and constituent essays from the link in the Complete Contents. This release contains 116 volumes from the series including Companions to Caryl Churchill, Mark Twain, Old English Literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Literature of the First World War. Forthcoming releases of Literature Online will include still more from this renowned series of key critical works.

[16 March 2012]

Companions to Literature volumes from Cambridge University Press added

This release of Literature Online now includes the first batch of volumes from the Companions to Literature series from Cambridge University Press. Over 50 volumes from this acclaimed series of critical texts, containing well over 700 individual essays, are now fully searchable and readable alongside Literature Online’s extensive collection of full-text journals.

The Companions to Literature is a highly valued series of volumes on a whole range of literary themes, periods, writers and movements. Each volume is edited by a leading scholar in the field and presents specially-commissioned essays written by experts. Designed principally for the student reader, each Companion presents clear and insightful analysis and a critical contemporary evaluation of the topic at hand. For the author Companions each writer is placed in literary and historical context; their major works are analysed and their influence on later writers assessed. The generic and topical Companions cover periods of English literature such as Old English or the Victorian Novel, and literary genres such as Modernism or Greek Tragedy, giving the student vital contextual information about political, social, religious and artistic relationships.

To access this content you can search via the Criticism search page or browse a list of volumes and constituent essays from the link in the Complete Contents. This release features over 50 volumes from the series including Companions to Chaucer, Contemporary Irish Poetry, Gothic Fiction, Kafka, Mary Shelley and Robert Frost. Forthcoming releases of Literature Online will include still more from this renowned series of key critical works.

[13 January 2012]

New and Updated Reference Works

Adding still further to Literature Online’s recently expanded reference work offering, this release sees the inclusion of one new and one updated title.

Oxford University Press’s Dictionary of Literary Terms is now available and provides succinct explanations of almost twelve hundred terms. It sheds light on some of the most troublesome literary terms encountered and offers clear descriptions of a vast range of ancient and modern critical and theoretical vocabulary. The Dictionary of Literary Terms can be searched from the Reference search or from Quick Search, Criticism and Reference searches and from links on Author Pages.

Also available in this release is the newest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. The 12th Edition of 2008 has now completely replaced the earlier edition that was previously available in Literature Online. The Dictionary is available in the Reference Shelf which is featured in the left-hand toolbar of every page where it can be search alone or alongside other Dictionaries and glossaries.

[4 November 2011]

Penguin Classics added

This release sees the inclusion of nearly 400 volumes, well over a thousand individual works, from the Penguin Classics series. Long recognized as the pre-eminent series of scholarly and accessible texts of world literature, the series has been at the heart of the study of literature for over 50 years. So too has Literature Online, in more recent times, and it is entirely appropriate that the two should now team up to offer access to these essential works in the home of literature and criticism online.

Texts by key English and American writers such as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain and the Bronte sisters are included but perhaps the most exciting content is the large number of works in translation. For the first time, Literature Online users will be able to search and read authoritative, modern translations of works by Emile Zola, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Giovanni Boccaccio, Farid Attar, Cao Xueqin and many others. Important additions also feature examples of non-fiction prose, biographies, travel writing, essays and prayers as well as scholarly modern editions of classics myths and sagas from Italy, Greece, Scandinavia and elsewhere.

As well as these essential works, the full introduction and textual notes will also be available. These introductions offer the perfect way into the text; containing key information about the biographical, historical and critical details surrounding the author and the text. Leading scholars in the field bring their own expertise in summarising the work in an accessible manner; Terry Eagleton introduces Bleak House, John Carey provides the same for Thackeray and Frank Kermode, Gillian Beer and Christopher Ricks introduce Trollope, Austen and Sterne’s works respectively. A full list of all the Penguin Classics Introductions is available here and they are searchable from the Reference search page.

The inclusion of this series (not available anywhere else online) in Literature Online further strengthens our commitment to provide access to the most important texts and editions which open up opportunities to new students and seasoned researchers alike.

[12 August 2011]

New Reference Resources

Following on from last year’s update to Literature Online’s reference works, we have now doubled our offering of essential encyclopaedias and companions covering a range of important and often-studied genres and national literatures. Oxford University Press’s Companion to Irish Literature and Concise Companion to English Literature are available and offer useful introductions and surveys of the history of both national literatures.

Covering African and American literature are University of Florida Press’s Handbook of African American Literature, Routledge’s Encyclopedia of African Literature and Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003. Additionally, Literature Online’s support of literary theory and linguistics is significantly enhanced with the inclusion of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and the two volume Encyclopedia of Linguistics.

To search these and all of Literature Online’s other reference works, simply go to the Reference search page and enter your search term(s). Alternatively, entries from reference volumes will also be returned from Quick Search, Criticism and Reference searches and from links on Author Pages.

[12 August 2011]

Poetry Archive Links: Even More Multimedia

Literature Online already offers nearly 900 video clips of poets reading their own and others’ works. Now we’ve expanded our offering of poetry multimedia by incorporating links to the freely available audio recordings at The Poetry Archive. That’s over 900 more links to poetry readings. The Poetry Archive is the brainchild of Andrew Motion, the former British Poet Laureate, who was concerned that high quality audio recordings of contemporary poets reading their own works were not being produced and that consequently an important resource was being lost for posterity. The Poetry Archive was thus established to create recordings of important contemporary poets based on the belief that such readings are a powerful source of insight, understanding and enjoyment. As well as creating brand new recordings, the Archive also gathers together and preserves historic and hard to find recordings of long dead poets. So, the Poetry Archive enables listeners to hear the works of contemporary poets such as Billy Collins, Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Longley alongside historic recordings of Edmund Blunden, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath and many more.

We’ve added these links to Literature Online to make over 920 clips as accessible and easy to find as possible. Links for featured poets will appear on their Author Page as well as under the Multimedia tab in Quick Search and Texts: All searches. Clicking on a link will open a new browser tab or window enabling you to retain your Literature Online session while exploring the Poetry Archive’s rich offerings.

[5 November 2010]

Suggest a Text for Literature Online

Literature Online lets you search and read over 350,000 works of literature from the 8th century to the present day. From The Canterbury Tales to the complete works of Shakespeare and Dickens right up to poetry from Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney, Literature Online provides authoritative editions of the most important texts as well as a vast collection of less studied, lesser known works. But even with all this, we cannot claim to have everything! And we’d love to know what primary works are important for your research that are currently not on offer.

Visit Literature Online’s Suggest a Text page and let us know about the text(s), authors or periods of literature that you think we could better represent in Literature Online. Tell us as much information as you think is necessary, for instance, if there is a specific edition of a work we should use or should avoid. Please note that we will not necessarily be able to add all your recommendations to Literature Online. While we will endeavour to include them at a future date, certain works are, of course, still in copyright and it may not be possible to license or locate certain editions. But please do let us know about any and all primary works that you think should be included in Literature Online.

The draw will close at the end of May 2011 and all entries received by that date will be automatically entered into our prize draw to win one of five US$20 Amazon vouchers.

[5 November 2010]

Twentieth Century Drama: Final Release

This release sees the Twelfth and Final Release of Twentieth Century Drama. Several years in the making, this concluding release confirms the collection as the essential gathering of plays from the English-speaking world from the last century. Twentieth-Century Drama now contains plays by over 300 authors from Britain and Ireland, North America and Canada, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century Drama.

Over 260 plays have been added to this final release, with highlights including:

Neil Simon: Over 30 works by the highly acclaimed and hugely successful American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner, Neil Simon. His early Broadway successes, such as Come Blow Your Horn (1961), The Odd Couple (1965) and Plaza Suite (1968), are included and show clearly Simon’s quick witted, sharply written style of plot and dialogue which came to so define his work. Also included are his semi-autobiographical trilogy of Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) and Broadway Bound (1986) as well as the hugely successful Lost in Yonkers (1991). In these later plays, Simon adds tragedy and pathos to his characteristic farce creating a more sophisticated drama which was no less successful than his earlier works. Neil Simon’s plays appear here online for the first time.
Simon Gray: More than 30 works by the noted British memoirist and playwright, Simon Gray, are featured in this release. From his early tv and radio adaptations such as Wise Child (1967) and Dutch Uncle (1969) to Spoiled (1971), Gray was finding his voice, developing the tone that with Butley (1971) would bring him critical acclaim. The sharpness of his writing and savage power of his character’s monologues came to define his success in plays and television films such as The Rear Column (1978), Close of Play (1979), The Common Pursuit (1984) and Old Flames (1990). Simon Gray’s works appear online for the first time.
Contemporary Canadian Drama: this release sees the inclusion of nearly 50 works by some of Canada’s most respected contemporary dramatists. Similar in style and sentiment to Neil Simon, Norm Foster is just as prolific too being represented by Sinners (1983), Wrong for Each Other (1992) and the classic The Melville Boys (1984) as well as many others. Also featured in this release is the work of Dave Carley including Into (1993), Two Ships Passing (1998) and The Edible Woman (2000).

Twentieth Century Drama covers the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. The contents ranges from popular West End productions to Harlem Renaissance plays, off-Broadway and regional not-for-profit theatre, Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works, historical pageants and verse drama, community theatre and agitprop, South African township theatre and plays from the formative years of the Irish National Theatre and the Royal Court's '1956 revolution'. To arrange a trial of Twentieth-Century Drama, please see our free trial information.

[5 November 2010]

New Multimedia Content: Shakespeare Audio Plays

This month’s release sees the launch of some exciting new audio content to further enhance Literature Online’s Multimedia offering. The Arkangel production of audio plays brings together all of Shakespeare’s plays in fully dramatised recordings featuring many noted Royal Shakespeare Company actors. Noted performances include Simon Russell Beale as Hamlet, Joseph Fiennes as Romeo and Sir John Gielgud as Gower in Pericles. The series won the 2004 Audie Award from the Audio Publishers Association and has garnered wide praise with the New York Times describing the series as a "rhapsody of words, assembled for the ear".

Each of the 38 plays is available in full and unabridged form based on a modern authoritative edition and can be played on any mp3 compatible media player. To navigate to the complete list of audio plays simply click on the new Multimedia link in the left hand toolbar. Audio plays can be accessed at scene level and have been linked with the Full Text already available in Literature Online. With links from the Full Text of the plays to the audio versions it is possible to seamlessly listen to and read all of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. For more information on downloading media players or to see what media players are already installed on your machine go to the Technical Support page in Literature Online.

[11 June 2010]

Updated Reference Resources

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English is a pre-eminent reference resource for the study of the genre. We are delighted to now offer the Second Edition of this important work in Literature Online. The Second Edition updates the 1995 edition with over 1,800 entries by more than 600 internationally recognised scholars. The Encyclopedia documents the history and development of the corpus of Post-Colonial writing and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories.

To search the Encyclopedia simply go to Literature Online’s Reference search page, check the corresponding box and enter your search term(s). Alternatively, entries from the Encyclopedia will also be returned from Quick Search, Criticism and Reference searches and from links on Author Pages.

[11 June 2010]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

In response to market feedback and usability testing, users of Literature Online will notice a number of enhancements to the design and functionality of the service in this month's release. New features include:

COUNTER-compliant Usage Statistics for Journals: Literature Online has updated its Journal Statistics reporting making them compliant with the COUNTER III Code of Practice. Authenticated administrators can now access full-text journal usage statistics for all their Chadwyck-Healey databases, including Literature Online, from a single, centralised location.

[19 February 2010]

Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition: Final Release

This release sees the Fifth and Final Release of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition; the newest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections portfolio. This is an essential collection of poetry which allows readers an unparalleled survey of the movements, schools and distinctive voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. It combines two existing Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century African American Poetry, with over 500 volumes of newly-licensed material from established and emergent poets. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition.

Over 200 volumes of influential and important poetry from North America have been added in Release Five. Highlights include:

Maya Angelou: This release contains many of this highly acclaimed and celebrated poet's works. Angelou's distinctively strong poetics, combining the lyrical traditions of blues and gospel music with honest emotions and political insight, are in evidence from her first collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) through to her more recent volume I Shall Not Be Moved (1990). Also included in her Collected Poems is "On the Pulse of Morning", the poem she read at Bill Clinton's Presidential Inauguration in 1993. Maya Angelou's poems appear online here for the first time.
Billy Collins: Two recent volumes by the critically and commercially successful Billy Collins are included in this release. The former US Poet Laureate's work is distinguished by its accessibility and wit and demonstrates his commitment to draw the reader into the poem, letting them experience the joy of it without being faced by the pressure of interpreting a single meaning. Collins's Nine Horses (2002) and The Trouble with Poetry (2005) appear in this release.
Further modernist works: Mina Loy's quintessentially modernist works contained in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1997) are published in this release. Her poems are marked by their clarity and directness, exhibiting a sometimes ferociously satiric and cynical edge. Though perhaps better known today as a figure of international Modernism, she was in her day highly regarded by, amongst others, Yvor Winters, whose Collected Poems are featured in this release also. Winters eschewed the modernist free verse of his early books such as The Immobile Wind (1921) and The Bare Hills (1927) in favour of a more neoclassical and traditional expression of clear poetics and forms.
Further representation of significant literary movements: This release sees the works of more marginal figures from influential literary movements of the Twentieth Century included. The New York School's Kenneth Koch appears in this release as does the Black Mountain School inspired poetry of Joel Oppenheimer. The influential feminist, Marxist poetry of Marge Piercy is featured in this release also. Sound Poetry is represented by the recent volumes of Jackson MacLow and Steve McCaffery.

This essential collection, now complete, includes over 100,000 poems covering the full range of modern American poetry from 1900 to the present day. To arrange a free trial of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition, please see our trial information.

[6 November 2009]

African Writers Series: Final Release

With the addition of the Eighth and Final Release, the Chadwyck-Healey online edition of the African Writers Series now contains over 250 volumes. Highlights of the new material include:

René Maran's 1921 novel Batouala. This important work won the Prix Goncourt, the first time it had been awarded to a work by a black writer, the year following its publication. In it Maran examines, through the character and community of the fictional African chief of the title, the mechanisms of French colonialism. As controversial as it is influential, the novel marked a turning point in the political and intellectual history of contemporary Africa.
Important collections of short stories from Mozambique, Egypt and Zimbabwe. Luis Bernardo Honwana's We Killed Mangy-Dog (1969) proved to be a significant and lasting influence on subsequent writing from Mozambique. Similarly involved in the politics of his nation is Sonallah Ibrahim whose The Smell of It (1971) examines life in Cairo's suburbs and was banned for five years in Egypt due to its critical view Nasser's administration. Also included in this release are further collections of short stories by José Vieira Luandino and Shimmer Chinodya.
Further award winning novels. Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1980) was the first recipient of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. This pioneering novel explores the experience of Muslim women in sub-Saharan Africa. The 1989 Noma winner, Chenjerai Hove's Bones, is also included in this release.
Novels with political intent. Aubrey Kachingwe brought his own experience as a journalist in 1960s Malawi to bear in his novel about the struggle for independence in the fictional African nation of Kwacha. No Easy Task (1966) examines the tensions and stresses between the press and the politicians. Biyi Bandele-Thomas paints, in his novels The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Sympathetic Undertaker (1991), a satirical portrait of contemporary Nigerian politics. Also included in this release is the influential Bound to Violence (1968) by Yambo Ouologuem, winner of the Prix Renaudot.

Launched in May 2005, the African Writers Series comprises a digital edition of the historic Heinemann print series. Founded in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and with Achebe himself as Founding Editor, the series went on to be central to the development of African literature for the next 40 years. The founders' aim was to produce a paperback series featuring writing by African authors that would be affordable for a general African readership. As African nations won independence, a pursuit often documented and even driven by works from the Series, writers like Achebe began to forge distinctive national literatures throughout the continent; the African Writers Series published work by all the major authors of this period, together with classic earlier texts and new writing, giving it a unique importance in African cultural history.

The African Writers Series is a premium module, so is not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access. If you are interested in arranging free trial access to this collection for your library, please see our trial information.

[6 November 2009]

Literature Online User Survey 2009

Literature Online is conducting a User Survey to help inform our decisions about future developments to the service. The Survey asks questions about how and why you use Literature Online as well as how it fits in with your general research or study practices. We're also interested to know what you think is currently missing from Literature Online. Your answers will help us to plan future developments to Literature Online and ensure that it continues to be the home of literature and criticism online.

All fully completed surveys will be entered into a prize draw for a chance to win one of ten US$25 Amazon vouchers. To take the survey, and the view a full list of the prize draw's Terms and Conditions, please see the User Survey page.

[13 October 2009]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

COUNTER-Compliant Usage Statistics for Books and Reference Works: Literature Online has extended its offering of usage statistics formats to include COUNTER-compliant statistics for books and reference works. These reports include numbers of chapter or reference articles accessed at volume level, turnaways by month and database and number of total searches and sessions for the entire database.

[1 May 2009]

Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition: Release Four

This release sees the Fourth Release of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition; the newest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections portfolio. This is an essential collection of poetry which allows readers an unparalleled survey of the movements, schools and distinctive voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. It combines two existing Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century African American Poetry, with over 500 volumes of newly-licensed material from established and emergent poets. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition.

Over 60 volumes of influential and important poetry from North America have been added in Release Four. Highlights include:

Nikki Giovanni: This release contains many of this acclaimed poet's works including her significant early volumes Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1968). Giovanni, hailed as the voice of a generation of African Americans, combines the personal and the political in her poetry, often expressing the radical and revolutionary sentiments surrounding black rights and black female rights in particular. This release includes thirty years of her collected works as well as more recent volumes such as Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002).
Deeper coverage of women's poetry: Adding to the collection's already extensive covering of women's poetry of the Twentieth Century, this release includes the works of notable poets such as Dorianne Laux, whose 2007 Oregon Book Award winning Facts about the Moon is featured, and the Language poet Hannah Weiner's We Speak Silent (1996). The innovative poetry of film-maker Abigail Child and the narrative poems and dramatic monologues of Linda Bierds are also included.
Beat poetry: The works of perhaps the most under-appreciated writer of the Beat movement, John Wieners, are added to the deep coverage of the poetry produced by this influential group. More peripheral, but no less significant, figures from the Beats, Tuli Kupferberg and Lew Welch, are also included.
Poetry of politics: Ruth Lechlitner's politically engaged and revolutionary verse, often containing naturalistic metaphors, is clearly seen in her first book of poetry; Tomorrow's Phoenix (1937). A later poet of the radical left and recipient of an American Book Award for lifetime achievement, Jack Hirschman, is also represented in this release with the inclusion of his Front Lines (2002).

When complete this essential collection will include over 100,000 poems covering the full range of modern American poetry from 1900 to the present day. To arrange a trial of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition, please see our free trial information.

[1 May 2009]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Eleven

Twentieth-Century Drama now contains over 1,950 plays by 203 authors from Britain and Ireland, North America, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century Drama.

Brian Friel: Seventeen plays by the celebrated Irish playwright are featured in this release, including the acclaimed Philidelphia, Here I Come! (1964) which established Friel's reputation as an emergent and important talent. Much of his work has a strong political backdrop, but Friel firmly fixes the audience's focus by creating metaphors of individuals who struggle with the disintegration of their society. This release also contains Friel's important works The Freedom of the City (1973), Translations (1980) and the highly praised Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). With this release, Friel's works appear online for the first time.
Classic British drama from the 1930s and 1940s: this release includes important works by writers famed for their poetry. T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and the essential satire The Cocktail Party (1949) are featured as are W.H. Auden's The Dance of Death (1933) and Louis MacNeice's stage and radio plays Out of the Picture (1937) and The Dark Tower (1947) amongst others. Adaptations of Sophocles, Aescyhlus and Euripides by the renowned poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes are also contained in this release.
Further coverage of postcolonial drama: This release contains nine plays and screenplays by the Pakistani-British writer Hanif Kureishi including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and London Kills Me (1991). Kureishi draws on his own experience to show the frustration, humour, tragedy and hope of the Anglo-Asian condition. This release also includes Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1957) by Errol John. Set in the Trinidad of his birth, it is widely considered to be the definitive 'yard' play.
More celebrated women playwrights: This release contains the free-form theatre pieces of Ntozake Shange including her breakthrough For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975) and her 'choreopoems' Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1979) and The Love Space Demands (1992) which combine poetry, song and dance.

When complete, the collection will include over 2,000 play texts, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. The current contents ranges from popular West End productions to Harlem Renaissance plays, off-Broadway and regional not-for-profit theatre, Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works, historical pageants and verse drama, community theatre and agitprop, South African township theatre and plays from the formative years of the Irish National Theatre and the Royal Court's '1956 revolution'. To arrange a trial of Twentieth-Century Drama, please see our free trial information.

[1 May 2009]

Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition: Release Three

This release sees the Third Release of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition; the newest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections portfolio. This is an essential collection of poetry which allows readers an unparalleled survey of the movements, schools and distinctive voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. It combines two existing Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century African American Poetry, with over 500 volumes of newly-licensed material from established and emergent poets. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition.

Over 85 volumes of influential and important poetry from North America have been added in Release Three. Highlights include:

Gwendolyn Brooks: Six volumes of poetry from one of the most distinctive voices of the Black Arts Movement including her Pulitzer prize-winning portrait of the coming of age of a young black Chicago woman Annie Allen (1949). The complex and intriguing In the Mecca (1968) and her more recent critically praised volumes such as To Disembark (1981) and The Near Johannesburg Boy (1986) are also included in this release.
Beat Poetry: Jack Kerouac, central member of the Beat movement and author of the iconic On the Road (1957), was an active and innovative poet. His 'blues' poems and loose use of the haiku form is to be seen to great effect in his posthumous collections Scattered Poems (1971) and Pomes All Sizes (1992) both included in this release. Philip Whalen, a member of the San Francisco branch of the Beats, is also featured with his Collected Poems (2007) in this release.
Deeper coverage of women's poetry: Gertrude Stein's experimental modernist verse is included in this release with two volumes of her Writings covering the period 1903-1946 as well as Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces, 1913-1927 (1953). The works of other influential women poets are featured for the first time including the works of Rochelle Owens, Anne Stevenson, C.D. Wright, Ruth Stone and Erin Mouré's Search Procedures (1996) and Little Theatres (2005).
Further coverage of poetry of the New York School: This release includes the Frank O'Hara and Bill Berkson collaboration Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings (1974) as well as volumes by Nick Piombino such as Theoretical Objects (1999). John Ashbery is further represented with the inclusion of one of his earliest volumes; the controversial and experimental The Tennis Court Oath (1962), which incorporates such avant-garde techniques as cut-ups and collages.
More Native-American verse: Increasing the coverage of Native-American poetry, exhibiting a concern over nature, identity and modernity, this release includes works by Paula Allen Gunn, Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe and Roberta Hill Whiteman.

[12 December 2008]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Ten

Twentieth-Century Drama now contains over 1,800 plays by 182 authors from Britain and Ireland, North America, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century Drama. Highlights of the new material include:

Harold Pinter: Over 35 works by the acclaimed and hugely influential British playwright and Nobel Prize laureate, Harold Pinter. His early works, which quickly established his reputation as a playwright possessing a unique and powerful style, The Room (1957) and The Dumb Waiter (1958), are included in this release. Pinter's expressive use of colloquial speech and measured silences, portraying the difficulties of communication and the many layers of meaning present in language, are seen in his most admired and influential pieces such as The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1971) and No Man's Land (1975). Harold Pinter's works appear online for the first time in this release.
Tom Stoppard: A contemporary of Pinter's and similarly owing much to the drama of Beckett, more than 35 of Tom Stoppard's works are included in this release. His detached style and erudite and witty dialogue is much in evidence in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1964) and Travesties (1974); two plays about figures, real and fictional, on the fringes of literary history. Other acclaimed Stoppard plays, such as Professional Foul (1977), The Real Thing (1982) and Arcadia (1993), are available in this release.
Neil LaBute: Over 20 plays by the playwright, screenwriter and director Neil LaBute are included in this release. His highly acclaimed and often performed Bash: Latter Day Plays (1999) series of works is featured as is his dramatic and powerful response to the September 11th attacks, The Mercy Seat (2002), and his recent critically acclaimed Fat Pig (2004).
Howard Sackler: This release also includes the works of the playwright and screenwriter Howard Sackler, including his much acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning The Great White Hope (1967).

[12 December 2008]

Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition: Release Two

This release sees the Second Release of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition; the newest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections portfolio. This is an essential collection of poetry which allows readers an unparalleled survey of the movements, schools and distinctive voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. It combines two existing Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century African American Poetry, with over 500 volumes of newly-licensed material from established and emergent poets. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition.

Over 60 volumes of influential and important poetry from North America have been added in Release Two. Highlights include:

John Ashbery: Twenty volumes from the foremost representative of the hugely influential New York School of the 1950s and 1960s including his first full-length collection, Some Trees (1956), selected by W.H. Auden as winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1976. More recent volumes, such as Chinese Whispers (2002), demonstrate Ashbery's continued relevance and poetic and theoretical importance. Ashbery's poetry appears here online for the first time.
Deeper coverage of American Confessional poetry: W.D. Snodgrass demonstrates the clarity and controlled emotion that typifies this movement in collections such as Heart's Needle (1959) and the complete series of dramatic monologues The Fuehrer Bunker (1995). Carl Dennis's informal, conversational tone can be seen to powerful effect in his New and Selected Poems (2004) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Practical Gods (2001).
More African-American and Chicano poetry volumes: the poet, performance artist and member of the Black Arts Movement Jayne Cortez is represented by volumes covering the last 40 years of her writings, including Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002). One of the most prominent African-American poets James Weldon Johnson's Complete Poems (2000) is included in this release as is Chicano poetry pioneer Rodolfo 'Corky' Gonzales's Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings (2001).
John Cage: Three volumes from the constantly experimenting and influential Cage including his 1961 collection Silence. Feted by both the Black Mountain School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as a significant and original voice, Cage blends elements of musical composition, abstract art, Dadaism and mushroom cultivation in his highly visual 'text-sound' poems.
Further coverage of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry: volumes by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Stephen Rodefer and Barrett Watten are included in this release as are further volumes by leading members of the movement Clark Coolidge, Peter Gizzi and Lyn Hejinian.

[19 September 2008]

African Writers Series: Release Seven

With the addition of Release Seven, the Chadwyck-Healey online edition of the African Writers Series now contains over 230 volumes. Highlights of the new material include:

Two collections of celebrated short fiction from Mozambican poet Mia Couto Voices Made Night (1990) and Everyman is a Race (1991). Further volumes of short stories from Egypt, Nigeria and Zimbabwe including Not Even God is Ripe Enough (1968) edited and collected by Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier.
The compelling collected speeches and writings of Tom Mboya, a Minister in the K.A.N.U government in Kenya and one of the chief architects of that country's independence until his assassination in 1969. This release also includes My Command (1981) by General Olusegun Obasanjo documenting his involvement, as a high-level army commander and later Head of State, in the Nigerian Civil War.
The conflict and disturbances arising out of the push towards modernity and the hold of the traditional past in several African nations is explored in Shimmer Chinodya's first novel Dew in the Morning (2001), Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool (1978) and Charles Mungoshi's significant collection of short stories The Setting Sun and the Rolling World (1989).
Flora Nwapa explores the role of women in rural Nigeria and the conflicts between the choices of marriage or education that her characters face. The Collection now includes Nwapa's two celebrated novels Efuru (1966) and Idu (1970).
Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Ferdinand Oyono examine the relationship of young Senegalese and Cameroonian men to the ruling French colonial class. Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure (1972) earned him the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noir. Two of Oyono's novels, Houseboy (1966) and The Old Man and the Medal (1969) appear in this release.

The African Writers Series is a premium module, so is not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access. When complete, the collection will include at least 300 of the 359 titles published in the original print series. If you are interested in arranging trial access to this collection for your library, please see our free trial information.

[19 September 2008]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Nine

Twentieth-Century Drama now contains over 1,700 plays by 178 authors from Britain and Ireland, North America, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century Drama.

This release includes over 70 works by the highly acclaimed American playwright David Mamet from his early one-act plays such as Duck Variations (1971) and Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) to his adaptations of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1985) and Uncle Vanya (1988). Mamet's most celebrated works, such as American Buffalo (1976), Speed-the-Plow (1987), Oleanna (1992) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), are also included in this release. Honoured with the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993, David Mamet's plays appear online for the first time.

Acclaimed North American drama of the 1950s and 1960s: The masterful blend of biting wit and acute social observation is strongly in evidence in George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch (1952) and the Faustian parody of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1955). Another successful proponent of this milieu, Jean Kerr, is represented by the inclusion of Mary, Mary (1961) and both the 'original' and 'performance' scripts of Poor Richard (1964).
More celebrated African drama: The works of the Nigerian critic and playwright Femi Osofisan including Red is the Freedom Road (2003), The Chattering and the Song (1997) and the epic Morountodun (1995) as well as the influential We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1980) by South African Zakes Mda powerfully explore betrayal, corruption and community in post-independence Africa.
August Wilson's complete 'decades' cycle: With the inclusion of King Hedley II (2005), Gem of the Ocean (2006) and Radio Golf (2007), Twentieth-Century Drama now includes the entire ten play cycle depicting the black experience in each decade of the twentieth-century.

This release also includes more significant drama from North America and Ireland with works by, amongst others, Djuna Barnes and John B. Keane. When complete, the collection will include over 2,000 play texts, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. The current contents ranges from popular West End productions to Harlem Renaissance plays, off-Broadway and regional not-for-profit theatre, Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works, historical pageants and verse drama, community theatre and agitprop, South African township theatre and plays from the formative years of the Irish National Theatre and the Royal Court's '1956 revolution'. To arrange a trial of Twentieth-Century Drama, please see our free trial information.

[19 September 2008]

New Poetry, Prose and Drama Volumes Added

This month's release sees more than 40 new volumes of poetry, prose and drama added to Literature Online. Further to the December 2007 publication of several important Faber and Faber poetry volumes, including the complete works of W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin, 18 more volumes from this publisher's pre-eminent modern poetry list are now available. A further 23 volumes of celebrated and often studied prose and drama from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century have also been added to Literature Online in this release.

Literature Online's coverage of celebrated British poetry has been further enhanced with the addition of recent collected editions of the poetry of Ted Hughes, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. Recent Scottish and Irish poetry are well represented with the inclusion of Douglas Dunn's The Donkey's Ears (2000), a compelling narrative poem of letters from a sailor on board a Russian flagship shortly before the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, Tom Paulin's The Wind Dog (1999) and Maurice Riordan's Floods (2000) and The Holy Land (2007). Volumes from emergent poets and the latest volumes from established poets are also featured such as Nick Laird's To A Fault (2005), Charles Boyle's T.S. Eliot prize shortlisted The Age of Cardboard and String (2001) and Lachlan Mackinnon's The Jupiter Collisions (2003). Literature Online now includes over two hundred volumes from Faber's pre-eminent modern poetry list including works by some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

As well as adding licensed material to the Literature Collections and to Literature Online, we also seek to add authoritative and complete editions of the most important older English and American works. Thus, this month's release sees the inclusion of a range of texts from fourteenth century works by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe through Caxton's The History of Reynard the Fox and William Cavendish's The Country Captain to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). Also included in this release is William Monk's hugely influential Hymns Ancient and Modern for Use in the Services of the Church (1889).

By continuing to add the most sought after and studied texts, we hope to ensure that Literature Online remains the pre-eminent electronic resource for English and American literature from the eight century to the present day.

[19 September 2008]

New Poets on Screen clips

This month's release contains 58 new Poets on Screen video clips bringing the total number in Literature Online to 899. The new clips feature contemporary poets such as Jayne Cortez, Robert Creeley, Paul Muldoon, Don Patterson, Carl Rakosi and Al Young reading their own works.

Users can access the whole library of clips from the Poets on Screen link on the left-hand toolbar, or under the 'Multimedia' heading of the Complete Contents page; links to Poets on Screen clips also appear on the relevant Author Pages and in Quick Search results. Links are also available from the clip page to the corresponding full text of the poem (where available) and vice versa.

Poets on Screen clips can be viewed using either RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. For more information on downloading media players or to see what media players are already installed on your machine go to the Technical Support page in Literature Online.

[19 September 2008]

Early Modern Literary Studies Prize

We are pleased to announce the winner of the fourth annual Literature Online prize for the best article published in the e-journal Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) over the last twelve months. The prize (to the value of £150) goes to Bradley D. Ryner for his article "Commodity Fetishism in Richard Brome's A Mad Couple Well Matched and its Sources" EMLS, 13.3 (January, 2008) 4.1-25 which can be read online at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/13-3/rynecomm.htm.

EMLS is published in electronic form only, and can be read free of charge in hypertext format at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. The journal publishes critical articles on English literature, literary culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also includes a Readers' Forum containing responses to published papers. It is published three times a year with the support of the Humanities Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University.

[19 September 2008]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

Bibliographies now searchable: Literature Online contains detailed bibliographies for over 1500 major authors. These bibliographies, listing both literary and non-literary publications, are now fully searchable and will be returned by searching from the Criticism and Reference: All page, the Reference Search page (select the 'bibliographies' check box to limit your results to only bibliographies) and from a Quick Search.
Full-Text Citation improvements: Literature Online's RIS format citations have been enhanced and expanded to include several new fields useful for the creation of full bibliographic citations including place of source volume publication, pagination, ISBN and separate fields for work and volume level authors or editors.
MLA International Bibliography Publisher Abstract field separately searchable: The MLAIB now contains publisher-provided abstracts for over 9,000 of its bibliographic records with more to be added in future updates. These abstracts are now separately searchable from the Advanced Search page of the MLAIB in Literature Online. Searches in Quick Search or the Criticism Keywords field will also return records with matches in abstracts. Please note: The MLAIB is a premium module and thus not available to all Literature Online subscribers. You can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access.

[19 September 2008]

Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition: Release One

This release sees the launch of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition; the newest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections portfolio. This is an essential collection of poetry which allows readers an unparalleled survey of the movements, schools and distinctive voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. It combines two existing Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century African American Poetry, with over 500 volumes of newly-licensed material from established and emergent poets. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition.

Release One of this collection contains more than 65,000 poems by over 450 of the most important established and emergent poets. Highlights of material added in this release include:

The major works of the modernist period such as the brittle imagist lyrics of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, the playful and abstract masterpieces of Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings and the symbolist cityscapes of Hart Crane.
The works of key African-American writers of the twentieth century such as James Weldon Johnson and Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps and Sterling Brown) and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Imamu Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde and Sonia Sanchez).
Essential works of Postmodern American poetry including representatives of Beat poetry (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder), the Black Mountain School (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson), the New York School (Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett), Deep Image poetry (Robert Bly, Jerome Rothenberg) and Concrete poetry (Ronald Johnson).
Greater representation of influential movements such as Objectivism (George Oppen and Carl Rakosi) and Language poetry (Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Bruce Andrews and Rae Armantrout).
Significant works by Chicano poets including the leading members of the Nuyorican poetry movement Miguel Pinero, Sandra Maria Esteves and Gloria Vando as well as the poetry of other important Hispanic-American writers such as Sarah Cortez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Tato Laviera.
Newly-licensed material from established and emergent poets such as Susan Howe, Denise Levertov, Michael Palmer, W.S. Merwin, Rosmarie Waldrop and Carl Rakosi.

[2 May 2008]

New Faber and Faber Poetry Volumes

This month's release sees the addition of 46 volumes published by Faber and Faber, including significant works from current Literature Online authors, such as Seamus Heaney and T.S. Eliot, and classic collections from authors new to Literature Online, such as W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin. Literature Online now includes over two hundred volumes from Faber's pre-eminent modern poetry list, which includes some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, from Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones to Lavinia Greenlaw and Andrew Motion.

The works of W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin appear here for the first time. Auden's complete oeuvre is now available in Literature Online, representing his early modernist works written while at Oxford in the 1920s through his experiments with a range of poetic forms such as ballads, lullabies and limericks to the later years of contrastingly dense and religious or light and witty verse. Also included in this release are the Auden and Louis MacNeice collaboration Letters from Iceland (1936) and Auden's collection of essays and dramatic writings from the period when he was arguably at the height of his power in the 1930s. Larkin's complete poems, including his juvenilia and such landmark volumes as The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), are also featured in full in this release. This is the first time that these central British poets' works have been made available online.

This release also sees the inclusion of recent volumes from established poets such as Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Alice Oswald and Daljit Nagra. Armitage's reworkings and translations of Homer's Odyssey (2006) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007) appear along with recent volumes of poetry like Travelling Songs (2002) and Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Corduroy Kid (2006). Heaney's modern translation of Beowulf (2007) is also included as is as his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection District and Circle (2006). T.S. Eliot himself is represented with new volumes of poetry: his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) is included in full, with the original illustrations by Nicholas Bentley, as is a facsimile edition of The Waste Land manuscript (1922) which features all of Pound's many annotations.

Literature Online is delighted to announce the inclusion of these important and influential new volumes from Faber and Faber. They further strengthen Literature Online's coverage of Twentieth Century and contemporary British poetry in the collection and truly make Literature Online the premier resource for the study of English and American literature.

[21 December 2007]

Linking from Oxford Reference Online

If your institution also subscribes to Oxford Reference Online, then you will have been able to retrieve results from their Core, Premium and Literature Collections from searches in Literature Online since December 2006. We are delighted to announce that reciprocal cross-search functionality has now been integrated into Oxford Reference Online. This means that when you view a full record page in Oxford Reference Online you will now have the ability, simply by clicking on the Literature Online logo, to run a relevant Quick Search (in a new browser window) in Literature Online.

Oxford Reference Online brings together language and subject reference works from Oxford University Press into a single cross-searchable resource. The Literature Online cross-search covers a selection of titles most relevant to literature from the Core, Premium and Literature Collections. For more information on this resource, and to learn how to enable Literature Online cross-search links, please see the Oxford Reference Online site.

In order to activate the links to enable Literature Online to Oxford Reference Online cross-searching, the librarian or systems administrator at your institution can either contact the Literature Online webmaster or access the Administration Page (username and password required) to activate links directly.

[21 December 2007]

African Writers Series: Release Six

With the addition of Release Six, the Chadwyck-Healey online edition of the African Writers Series now contains over 210 volumes. Highlights of the new material include:

Nelson Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (1973), containing articles, speeches and trial transcriptions by Africa's foremost campaigner for freedom and racial equality, first appeared in the African Writers Series ten years into Mandela's twenty-seven year imprisonment.
Dominic Mulaisho's The Tongue of the Dumb (1971), a novel exploring the author's own experience of government through the veil of a power struggle between a councillor and his Chief, was feted as the first Zambian novel. Mulaisho's second novel, The Smoke that Thunders (1979) is also included in this release.
Francis Bebey's examinations of the conflict between young love and traditional values in Agatha Moudio's Son (1971) and The Ashanti Doll (1978) won him the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afriqu Noir award. The African Writers Series includes Joyce A. Hutchinson's translations of both novels.
Both modern and traditional poetry from Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria is included with volumes by Joe De Graft, A.W. Kayper-Mensah and Jared Angira. The Romanus Egudu and Donatus Nwoga edited Igbo Traditional Verse (1973) is a remarkable gathering together of translations of songs, recitations and poems which give a vivid voice to Igbo society.

Launched in May 2005, the African Writers Series is the most recent addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, and comprises a digital edition of the historic Heinemann print series. Founded in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and with Achebe himself as Founding Editor, the series went on to be central to the development of African literature for the next 40 years. The founders' aim was to produce a paperback series featuring writing by African authors that would be affordable for a general African readership. As African nations won independence, a pursuit often documented and even driven by works from the Series, writers like Achebe began to forge distinctive national literatures throughout the continent; the African Writers Series published work by all the major authors of this period, together with classic earlier texts and new writing, giving it a unique importance in African cultural history.

The African Writers Series is a premium module, so is not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access. When complete, the collection will include at least 300 of the 359 titles published in the original print series. If you are interested in arranging trial access to this collection for your library, please see our free trial information.

[21 December 2007]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Eight

Twentieth-Century Drama now contains over 1,550 plays by 178 authors from Britain and Ireland, North America, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module and therefore not available to all Literature Online subscribers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access to Twentieth-Century Drama.

This release includes 59 plays by the expatriate American poet and experimental playwright Gertrude Stein including many of her rarely performed 'word plays' such as They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife (1949) and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938); a modern reworking of Marlowe's play into which Stein adds an actress playing a dog who repeatedly says 'Thank you'. Also included are Stein's librettos for Virgil Thompson's operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1949).

Other highlights of this release include:

More celebrated American drama: Sophie Treadwell's feminist and historical dramas Machinal (1928) and Hope for a Harvest (1941), Michael Weller's portrayals of student-life and failed romance in Moonchildren (1972) and Loose Ends (1979) and James Goldman's Broadway version of The Lion in Winter (1966); a dramatisation of the personality conflicts and political machinations taking place in the winter of 1183 at Henry Plantagenet's court in France.
Deeper coverage of ethnic theatre: This release includes further plays by Asian-American and Native-American playwrights such as Elizabeth Wong's Letters to a Student Revolutionary (1996) and China Doll (1996), and William S. Yellow Robe's Independence of Eddie Rose (1999).
Further drama from Africa: In addition to works from the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean playwrights Ola Rotimi, Osonye Tess Onwueme and Yulisa Amadu Maddy, this release sees the inclusion of important plays by the Ghanaian playwright and founder of the Experimental Theatre and Ghana Drama Studio, Efua Theodora Sutherland.

[21 December 2007]

Variant Spellings Functionality Now Available to All Users

This release sees the launch of innovative variant spelling functionality for all Literature Online users. Building on research being conducted by Professor Martin Mueller at Northwestern University, the Virtual Orthographic Standardisation Project has developed a tool that allows both expert and non-expert users to search databases such as Literature Online using modern English spellings and automatically retrieve instances of extant early modern spelling variants.

The project is funded by the Council of Library Initiatives (CLI) of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) with support from ProQuest. Beta versions of Literature Online and Early English Books Online (EEBO) with built-in Virtual Orthographic Standardisation have been made available to users of these resources at 13 member institutions since November 2006 for a period of development and testing. With this release, Virtual Orthographic Standardisation is available to all users of Literature Online.

This exciting functionality represents a major step forward in searching the early texts in Literature Online, and is not currently available in any other commercial products.

The Virtual Orthographic Standardisation functionality is very easy to use. Two new search boxes appear on the Search: Texts pages allowing users to search for Variant spellings and/or Variant forms. If you type a search term in the Keyword(s) box and the Variant spellings box is checked when you submit your search, you will automatically retrieve all instances of your search term and its early modern variant forms present in Literature Online. For example, if the box for Variant spellings is checked and you type the word murder in the Keyword(s) field, when you submit your search you will retrieve all occurrences of the word murder and its early modern variants murther, murdre, murdir and mvrder.

The Variant forms box allows users to lemmatise their search terms and takes the process of standardisation one step further. Lemmatisation is the linguist's term for the practice of bundling the different forms of a word under the form in which the word is likely to appear in a dictionary. Thus loves, loved and loving are forms of the lemma love. Lemmatisation is part of the Virtual Orthographic Standardisation project, which will allow users to look for all variant spellings of the standard spelling love or search for the lemma love, which would retrieve all variant spellings of the standard spellings love, loves, loveth, loving, and loved.

A new Check for variants link, which appears to the right of the Keyword(s) field on the Search: Texts screens, allows you to browse and manually select particular variant forms of your search term or terms to build a more targeted search query.

The new Variant spellings checkbox absorbs and replaces the existing Typographical variants functionality. When you search with the Variant spellings box checked, you will automatically retrieve instances of your search term(s) modified by any of the simple substitutions previously dealt with by the old Typographical variants functionality (i for j and vice versa, u for v and vice versa, and uu and vv for w etc).

This exciting new functionality also appears in the King James Bible on Literature Online's Reference Shelf which is accessible from the left hand tool bar on all pages. If your institution also subscribes to EEBO, and you have cross-searching enabled, then your variant spellings or variant forms search in Literature Online will retrieve results from both databases. Cross-searching of EEBO and Literature Online can be conducted by using the Quick Search box. To find out more about the Virtual Standards Orthographic Project and read tips on searching using the new variant spellings and variant forms functionality click on the 'What is this?' and the 'hints on phrase searching' links on the Search: Texts page.

[21 December 2007]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

New Printing Option: A new Print View link now appears at the top of all full text, full record and Author pages. This view removes extraneous information from the screen such as logos, tool bars and banners to make printing from Literature Online more straightforward. This feature will also apply to printing from the Marked List and My Archive.
Improved display of Images: images and tables included in full-texts are now displayed as clickable thumbnails making them more obvious to the user and more easily viewed and printed.
New footnote functionality: Footnotes are now identified as a clickable number occurring at the same point that the note is located in the full-text. Hovering over the number will display a pop-up box showing the beginning of the note. Clicking the note number will scroll automatically to the end of the page where the full note appears highlighted for easy reference. A 'back to top' link brings the user back up to the text.
Enhanced full-text journals' table of contents: The full-text journal contents page allows users to browse through the various issues of a journal held in Literature Online's collection. They now display not only the month and year of publication but also the volume and issue number thus permitting users to identify the desired issue more easily.

[21 December 2007]

Filming Literature competition

Congratulations to the finalists of the Literature Online film competition at the University of Oxford.

The winner this year was Amelia Leeson for her imaginative and dramatic interpretation of an episode from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Runners-up prizes went to Craig Webster for his inventive reworking of an Emily Dickinson poem and Antony Herrmann for his creative take on Proust. Further information about the competition can be found on the Filming Literature page.

[10 August 2007]

EMLS prize

We are pleased to announce the winner of the third annual Literature Online prize, for the best article published in the e-journal Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) over the last twelve months. The prize (to the value of £150) goes to Helga Duncan, for her article, "'Headdie Ryots' as Reformations: Marlowe's Libertine Poetics", EMLS, 12.2 (September, 2006) 2.1-38, which can be read online at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/12-2/duncmarl.htm.

EMLS is published in electronic form only, and can be read free of charge in hypertext format at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. The journal publishes critical articles on English literature, literary culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also includes a Readers' Forum containing responses to published papers. It is published three times a year with the support of the Department of English at Sheffield Hallam University.

[10 August 2007]

RSS feeds now available

Literature Online now offers RSS feeds to allow users to keep up to date with news about its content and functionality developments.

One of the great advantages of using RSS feeds to receive information about Literature Online is that, once subscribed to, you will automatically receive news and information without clogging up your email inbox. The feed will go to the designated RSS reader of your choosing allowing you to check up on our news when it is most convenient. Each feed will also come with a link back to Literature Online so you can quickly and easily see what's new.

For more information on Literature Online's RSS feeds and how to subscribe please see the About RSS feeds page.

[15 June 2007]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

Users of Literature Online will notice enhancements to the design and functionality of the service in this month's release. These have been developed in response to feedback from users. New features include:

Safari support: Literature Online can now be viewed using Safari 2.0. For more information on browser support, please see the Technical Support page.
New and clearer designs for the List of Results pages in Literature Online have been developed and appear for the first time in this release. The new design presents an overview of search results in a clearer and more dynamic way than before.
New subscriptions information added to home page: you can now see at a glance which elements of Literature Online your institution is subscribed to.
Reference Shelf added to home page: the popular and extremely useful Reference Shelf has now been added to the home page allowing users to search the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary, the Shakespeare Glossary and King James Bible more easily.
New criticism search options: the new 'Latest update only' checkbox allows you to limit your search to records and articles from the latest data release; there is also a new option to search for 'Articles' or 'Reviews' only from the Combined Criticism page.
Hyperlinks in ABELL records: all Subject terms in ABELL records are now hyperlinked, allowing you to run an instant search on that subject.

[15 June 2007]

Links to JSTOR and Project MUSE

Literature Online has extended its JSTOR linking. Previously, subscribers who also participate in JSTOR's Arts and Sciences I, Arts and Sciences II, Arts and Sciences III or Language and Literature have been able to access full-text articles in these JSTOR collections by following links from corresponding citations in ABELL, or, where subscribed, the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB).

We have now added a further two JSTOR collections, Arts and Sciences IV and Arts and Sciences Complement, to our coverage for all Literature Online subscribers. Previously these collections were only available to MLAIB subscribers. Literature Online now offers nearly 160,000 JSTOR links for ABELL and MLAIB citations.

Links from MLAIB citations to corresponding full-text articles in Project MUSE have been included in Literature Online since December 2006. Institutions can now enable or disable linking to Project Muse and JSTOR directly, by using Literature Online's Administration Resources area (password required – this page is for the use of librarians or local administrators). You can find out more about linking to other scholarly resources in Literature Online on the linking information page.

[15 June 2007]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Seven

The latest release of the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collection Twentieth-Century Drama includes a further 180 titles, including such major works of modern theatre as Thornton Wilder's Our Town (Pulitzer Prize, 1938), considered to be America's most often-performed play, and Horton Foote's nine-play chronicle The Orphan's Home Cycle (1962-1997), together with a number of influential works of experimental and Off-Off-Broadway theatre from the 1970s.

Twentieth-Century Drama, which is a premium module and is therefore not available to all subscribers, now contains 1,450 plays by 165 authors from throughout the English-speaking world. The collection's breadth of content and powerful search options allow users to open up connections between classic plays such as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1923), Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables (1954) or August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and less well-known texts drawn from the full range of modern theatrical traditions. Areas such as postcolonial writing, women's theatre, and community theatre are given full representation, and Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works appear alongside popular comedies, melodramas, farces and thrillers. If you are interested in arranging free trial access to this collection for your library, please see our free trial information.

Other highlights of this release include:

The complete works of Thornton Wilder: in addition to Our Town (1938), this includes the ambitious allegorical work The Skin of our Teeth (1942), the hit comedy The Matchmaker (1954), which was later adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly!, and the plays from the Seven Deadly Sins sequence and the uncompleted Seven Ages of Man cycle.
Major contemporary American authors: in addition to the works of the Texan author Horton Foote, the new release includes Emily Mann's documentary-style 'Theatre of Testimony' works, Philip Kan Gotanda's analyses of Asian-American life, and the innovative works of the Cuban-born playwright Maria Irene Fornes, such as her Obie-winning play Fefu and her Friends (1979).
Experimental theatre: from the leading 1970s avant-gardists Lee Breuer and Richard Foreman to Ping Chong's contemporary multi-media works.
American theatre of the 1920s and 30s: from domestic comedy (Kaufman and Connelly's Dulcy, 1921), American Regionalism (Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett, Pulitzer Prize, 1921) and bar-room romance (Wiliam Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, Pulitzer Prize, 1939) to the provocative modern themes of Sidney Coe Howard (They Knew What They Wanted, Pulitzer Prize, 1925), John Howard Lawson's 'political vaudeville' Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925) and Irwin Shaw's anti-war play Bury the Dead (1936).
Important works of gay theatre from Off-Off-Broadway: Robert Patrick's Fog (1969) and Albert Innaurato's Gemini and The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie (both 1977).

When complete, the collection will include over 2,000 play texts, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day.

[15 June 2007]

African Writers Series: Release Five

With the addition of Release Five, the Chadwyck-Healey online edition of the African Writers Series now contains almost 200 volumes. Highlights of the new material added include:

Alex La Guma’s vivid accounts of the South African anti-apartheid struggle, including A Walk in the Night and other stories (1967) and In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972)
Thomas Mofolo’s landmark 1925 novel Chaka, a tragic portrayal of the Zulu king Shaka; originally published in Sesotho, the AWS includes Daniel P. Kunene’s 1981 English translation
The novels of John Munonye, a Nigerian contemporary of Chinua Achebe, whose works, such as Oil Man of Obanye (1971) share a similar focus on Igbo traditions and rural life
Emmanuel N. Obiechina’s edition of Onitsha Market Literature (1972), a remarkable collection of popular Nigerian pamphlets

The African Writers Series is a premium module, so is not available to all Literature Online subscribers. Launched in May 2005, it is the latest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, and comprises a digital edition of the historic Heinemann print series. Founded in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and with Achebe himself as Founding Editor, the series went on to be central to the development of African literature for the next 40 years. The founders' aim was to produce a paperback series featuring writing by African authors that would be affordable for a general African readership. As African nations won independence, writers like Achebe began to forge distinctive national literatures throughout the continent; the African Writers Series published work by all the major authors of this period, together with classic earlier texts and new writing, giving it a unique importance in African cultural history.

When complete, the collection will include at least 300 of the 359 titles published in the original print series. If you are interested in arranging free trial access to this collection for your library, please see our free trial information.

[15 June 2007]

Literature Online's Tenth Birthday Competition Results

To celebrate Literature Online's Tenth Birthday, we have held a competition giving users the chance to win one of six $100 Amazon vouchers. Many thanks to all of you who entered and congratulations to the six lucky winners. To take a look at the questions and answers as well as the list of winners go to our Tenth Birthday page. Also on this page you will find our Tenth Birthday Powerpoint which shows how Literature Online has evolved and grown over the last ten years to become the home of literature and criticism online.

[4 May 2007]

Linking to Oxford Reference Online

If your institution also subscribes to Oxford Reference Online, you will now be able to see links to entries from more than thirty Oxford University Press reference titles in your Literature Online search results. When you perform a search in Quick Search, Search: Criticism and Reference (All) or Search: Criticism and Reference (Reference), relevant reference results will now appear under an Oxford Reference Online sub-heading. By clicking on the entry titles, you can link out directly to the full text of the entry on the Oxford Reference Online site.

Oxford Reference Online brings together language and subject reference works from Oxford University Press into a single cross-searchable resource. The Literature Online cross-search covers a selection of titles most relevant to literature from the Core, Premium and Literature Collections. Please note that results have not been filtered to match your institution’s Oxford Reference Online subscription profile. More information on this resource, see the Oxford Reference Online site.

In order to activate the links, the librarian or systems administrator at your institution can either contact their ProQuest Customer Service representative, contact the Literature Online webmaster, or access the Administration Page to activate links directly.

[21 December 2006]

Functionality Enhancements

In response to market feedback and usability testing, we have added a number of enhancements to the Literature Online interface, including:

Enriched indexing in Quick Search: we have added the titles of major literary works to the background Quick Search indexes for author biographies and reference works. This means that a search for 'great gatsby' or 'jane eyre' will now retrieve biographies and other author-level reference material which discusses those works. We have also made improvements to allow for searching by selected variant work titles and common spelling variations.
Search Texts page: if you click on the link to Search Texts, you will see that this now includes all the advanced search options, making it quicker and easier to carry out more targeted searches.
Genre searching: the new-look Search Texts page also includes a Genre search field which allows you to restrict your search to poetic genres such as 'sonnet', 'dramatic monologue' and 'concrete poem', or dramatic genres such as 'tragedy' and 'ballad opera'. To read the editorial parameters behind the genre indexing, please click on the 'scope note (poetry)' or 'scope note (drama)' links next to the Genre search field.

[21 December 2006]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Six

Twentieth-Century Drama now contains 1,250 play texts by 146 principal authors from Britain and Ireland, North America, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module, which is not available to all Literature Online subscribers. Subscribers to Twentieth-Century Drama can access these plays via searches in Literature Online; alternatively, click on 'Individual Collections' from the home page to access the stand-alone interface, which includes features that are not available in the main Literature Online search pages.

This release includes 32 plays by the first American to achieve worldwide recognition as a major playwright, the 1936 Nobel Prize-winner Eugene O'Neill. Featured texts include O'Neill's first play for the Provincetown Players, Bound East for Cardiff (1916), his Broadway debut Beyond the Horizon (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1920), and many works from his expressionist phase, such as The Emperor Jones (1920), whose title role is widely considered the first important role for a black performer in mainstream American theatre – the 1925 revival launched the career of Paul Robeson.

This further strengthens the collection's coverage of North American theatre. Twentieth-Century Drama now contains 14 Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, from O'Neill's Anna Christie (1921) and Susan Glaspell's In Alison's House (1931) to Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and August Wilson's The Piano Lesson (1990).

Other key features of this release include:

Deeper coverage of African American theatre: alongside existing plays by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, the new release includes Georgia Douglas Johnson's Little Theatre plays from the 1920s and 30s, Alice Childress's Off-Broadway works of the 1960s and 70s, and P.J. Gibson's 1985 work Brown Silk and Magenta Stockings
Landmark plays of the 1970s such as Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man (1979) and Wakako Yamauchi's And the Soul Shall Dance (1976), first performed by the East-West Players, the first contemporary Asian-American theatre company
More rare and neglected plays from the English radical theatre tradition: Allan Monkhouse's anti-war play The Conquering Hero (1924) and Montagu Slater's miners' strike drama New Way Wins: the play from Stay Down, Miner (1937)

When complete, the collection will include over 2,000 play texts from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. The current contents range from popular West End productions (J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, 1904; Noël Coward's Private Lives, 1930; Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, 1954) to Harlem Renaissance plays, off-Broadway and regional not-for-profit theatre, Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works, historical pageants and verse drama, community theatre and agitprop, South African township theatre and plays from the formative years of the Irish National Theatre and the Royal Court's '1956 revolution'. Playwrights confirmed for inclusion in forthcoming releases include Lee Breuer, Marc Connelly, Ping Chong, Owen Davis, Horton Foote, Richard Foreman, Zona Gale, John Howard Lawson and William Saroyan.

To arrange a trial of Twentieth-Century Drama, please see our free trial information.

[21 December 2006]

African Writers Series: Release Four

Launched in May 2005, the African Writers Series is the latest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, and comprises a digital edition of the historic Heinemann print series. Founded in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and with Achebe himself as Founding Editor, the series went on to have a unique and central importance in African literature for the next 40 years. The founders' aim was to produce a paperback series featuring writing by African authors that would be affordable for a general African readership. As African nations won independence, writers like Achebe began to forge distinctive national literatures throughout the continent; the African Writers Series published work by all the major authors of this period, together with classic earlier texts and new writing, giving it a unique importance in African cultural history. The African Writers Series is a premium module, which is not available to all Literature Online subscribers.

Release Four of the electronic edition contains a total of 181 volumes, and sees the addition of the single most significant author associated with the series, Chinua Achebe. In addition to his role as Series Editor, Achebe's novels were a major influence and inspiration to other African writers in their exploration of traditional Igbo society and values, and of the historical encounter between colonizer and colonized. All six of Achebe's prose volumes for the AWS are included:

Things Fall Apart (AWS No. 1, 1962)
No Longer at Ease (AWS No. 3, 1963)
Arrow of God (AWS No. 16, 1965, revised edition 1974)
A Man of the People (AWS No. 31, 1966)
Girls at War and other stories (AWS No. 100, 1972)
Anthills of the Savannah (1988)

Also new to this release are Mazisi Kunene's epic poem on the rise of the Zulu empire, Emperor Shaka the Great (1979), two early accounts of the Nigeria-Biafra war – Elechi Amadi's Sunset in Biafra (1973) and I.N.C. Aniebo's novel The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974) – and several anthologies of African myths and folk tales, including Myths and Legends of the Swahili (ed. Jan Knappert) and The Way We Lived: Ibo Customs and Stories (ed. Rems Nna Umeasiegbu).

Subscribers to the African Writers Series can access these texts via searches in Literature Online; alternatively, click on 'Individual Collections' from the home page to access the stand-alone interface, which includes features that are not available in the main Literature Online search pages. The Heinemann series was noted for its striking book cover designs, often incorporating elements of traditional African art. The standalone interface includes a Cover Gallery, which contains a chronological list of the entire print series, with links to full colour images of the original cover designs for selected volumes. This can be found in the Information Centre, along with a specially commissioned introductory essay, 'The Tiger That Pounced: The African Writers Series (1962-2003) and the Online Reader', written by Robert Fraser (Senior Research Fellow in Literature at the Open University).

To arrange a trial of the African Writers Series, please see our free trial information.

[21 December 2006]

New ABELL volume published

Volume 80 of the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) was published in October 2006, covering scholarship published in the year 2005. ABELL, which can be accessed via the Criticism screen in Search: Criticism and Reference, contains more than 880,000 records covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world; unpublished doctoral dissertations are covered for the period 1920-1999.

[10 November 2006]

Literature Online Advisory Board

We are pleased to announce the appointment of the new Literature Online advisory board. The members are drawn both from the scholarly and library communities and will be providing guidance regarding all areas of the future development of Literature Online:

Dr Toby Burrows, Principal Librarian, Scholars' Centre, University of Western Australia Library, Australia
Professor Steven Connor, Academic Director, London Consortium, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, London, UK
Jane Pinney Faulkner, English and French Literature Librarian, Davidson Library, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Dr. Todd Gilman, Librarian for Literature in English, Yale University, USA
Professor James L. Harner, Department of English, Texas A&M University, USA
Professor Thomas Keymer, Chancellor Jackman Professor of English, University of Toronto, Canada
Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park, and Acting Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, USA
Professor Giovanni Luciani, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Professor Kyongjoo Hong Ryou, Division of English Language and Literature, Sookmyung Women's University, Korea
Emma Walkey, Assistant Librarian (Humanities), University of Essex, UK

[11 August 2006]

Early Modern Literary Studies Prize

We are pleased to announce the winner of the second annual Literature Online prize, for the best article published in the e-journal Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) over the last twelve months. The prize (to the value of £150) goes to Alexandra G. Bennett, for her article, "'Now let my language speake': The Authorship, Rewriting, and Audience(s) of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley", EMLS, 11.2 (September, 2005) 3.1-13, which can be read online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/11-2/benncav2.htm.

EMLS is published in electronic form only, and can be read free of charge in hypertext format at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. The journal publishes critical articles on English literature, literary culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also includes a Readers' Forum containing responses to published papers. It is published three times a year with the support of the Department of English at Sheffield Hallam University.

[11 August 2006]

Cambridge Shakespeare and quartos added

This month's release sees the addition of an entire modern annotated edition of Shakespeare's works, together with 24 quarto editions of individual plays. This allows users to search and study the whole Shakespearean canon using modern spellings, and also to compare variant texts of single plays. The Cambridge Shakespeare, edited by William George Clark with W. Aldis Wright and John Glover (9 vols.; Macmillan, printed at the Cambridge University Press, 1863–66), was of considerable historical importance for its advanced approach to textual editing, and, in its one-volume version (The Globe Shakespeare, 1864), remained the standard compact edition for many years. Prefaces and textual footnotes are included, and the Cambridge Shakespeare also includes modern-spelling versions of Shakespeare's complete poetic works.

This complements Literature Online's existing collection of Shakespearean texts, which includes the entirety of the First Folio (36 plays, published 1623), supplemented by individual editions of plays not included in the First Folio: quarto editions of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609) and Edward III (1596) and the collaborative works The Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher, taken from the 1679 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's works) and The Book of Thomas More (with Anthony Munday and others, 1911 edition).

The list of titles added in this release includes Shakespeare's earliest dramatic publications – The most lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (Q1, 1594), The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (i.e. Henry VI, Part Two, Q1, 1594) and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (Henry VI, Part Three, octavo, 1595) – and covers all plays for which quartos survived, including multiple editions of Hamlet (the 'good' and 'bad' quartos of 1603 and 1605), Richard the Second (Q1, 1597 and Q2, 1608), and Romeo and Juliet (Q1, 1597 and Q2, 1599).

No other resource contains such a richness of primary sources for the historical, textual and contextual study of Shakespeare's works.

[29 June 2006]

Upgrade to the Bibliography of American Literature

All Literature Online customers also have access to Chadwyck-Healey's electronic version of the Bibliography of American Literature. This collection has now been fully re-designed and upgraded, with a new frames-free interface and a range of new functional features, including:

Marked List: from the search results page, bibliographic records can be added to a marked list for emailing, printing or downloading.
Downloading Citations: from the full record page, users can select 'Download citation' to save bibliographic information as a text file.
Durable URL bookmarking: all full record pages include a 'Durable URL for this page' link.
Search History: previous searches can be repeated or combined using Boolean operators.

To access the Bibliography of American Literature, follow the link from the Literature Online home page to Individual Collections, then select Bibliography of American Literature from the list at the bottom of the page.

The original print version of the Bibliography of American Literature was published in nine volumes by for the Bibliographical Society of America by the Yale University Press between 1955 and 1991. It catalogues and describes the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to the early twentieth century, and is recognised as one of the greatest achievements of modern bibliographic scholarship. In total, the Bibliography lists more than 37,000 works by 281 literary authors (the scope of the Bibliography covers authors who died up to 1930). For each author, all first editions are listed chronologically, and records include full physical descriptions of the volumes, extending to pagination, measurements, page gatherings, binding, and cloth type, along with details of libraries in which the edition is held.

[29 June 2006]

New JSTOR links added

Literature Online has extended its JSTOR linking.

Previously, subscribers who also participate in JSTOR's Arts and Sciences I, Arts and Sciences II or Language and Literature have been able to access full-text articles in these JSTOR collections by following links from corresponding citations in ABELL, or, where subscribed, the MLA International Bibliography.

We have now added Arts and Sciences III to our coverage for all Literature Online subscribers. In addition, subscribers to the MLA International Bibliography through Literature Online can link to a further four collections: Arts and Sciences IV, Arts and Sciences Complement, Music and General Science.

Institutions can customise their user profile to enable or disable links to JSTOR through the Administration Resources (password required – this page is for the use of librarians or local administrators).

[29 June 2006]

African Writers Series: Release Three

Launched in May 2005, the African Writers Series is the latest addition to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, and comprises a digital edition of the historic Heinemann print series. Founded in 1962, at a time when African nations were gaining independence and new generations of African writers began to forge distinctive national literatures throughout the continent, the series went on to have a unique and central importance in African literature for the next 40 years. The African Writers Series is a premium module, which is not available to all Literature Online subscribers.

Release Three of the electronic edition contains a total of 147 volumes. This release contains the complete published works of Bessie Head, one of modern Africa's most distinctive voices; in addition, major authors that are new to this release include Shimmer Chinodya, Farida Karodia, Charles Mungoshi, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p'Bitek, Richard Rive and Mongane Wally Serote. The collection now covers the whole historical range of modern African fiction, from early pioneering novels by black African authors such as Sol Plaatje's Mhudi (1930; published in the AWS in 1978), Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy (1946; AWS 1963), and Cyprian Ekwensi's Burning Grass (1962), to later masterpieces such as Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1969), Head's A Question of Power (1974), and Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger (1978), right up to the last two volumes published in the print series: Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes and Daniel Mengara's Mema (both October 2003).

Subscribers to the African Writers Series can access these texts via searches in Literature Online; alternatively, click on 'Individual Collections' from the home page to access the stand-alone interface, which includes features that are not available in the main Literature Online search pages. The Heinemann series was noted for its striking book cover designs, often incorporating elements of traditional African art, and in this release we have added a Cover Gallery: this contains a chronological list of the entire print series, with links to full colour images of the original cover designs for selected volumes. This can be found in the Information Centre of the stand-alone version, along with a specially commissioned introductory essay, 'The Tiger That Pounced: The African Writers Series (1962-2003) and the Online Reader', written by Robert Fraser (Senior Research Fellow in Literature at the Open University).

To arrange a trial of the African Writers Series, please see our free trial information.

[29 June 2006]

Twentieth-Century Drama: Release Five

Twentieth-Century Drama now contains 1,200 play texts by 139 principal authors from Britain and Ireland, North America, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. This collection is a premium module, which is not available to all Literature Online subscribers. Subscribers to Twentieth-Century Drama can access these plays via searches in Literature Online; alternatively, click on 'Individual Collections' from the home page to access the stand-alone interface, which includes features that are not available in the main Literature Online search pages.

Plays added to this release are drawn from throughout the collection's historical and geographical range, from early women playwrights such as Rachel Crothers and Elizabeth Robins to 1960s Black Arts and protest theatre (Amiri Baraka, Megan Terry), major postcolonial writers (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jack Davis) and contemporary American classics. We have added further depth and diversity to our coverage of the history of North American theatre, and the collection now includes 12 Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, from Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom (1927) and Susan Glaspell's In Alison's House (1931) to Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and August Wilson's The Piano Lesson (1990).

To arrange a trial of Twentieth-Century Drama, please see our free trial information.

[29 June 2006]

Enhanced usage statistics reporting

Usage statistics have been upgraded to give administrators the option of viewing statistics broken out into the separate premium modules that they are subscribed to. There are three premium modules available: the MLA International Bibliography, Twentieth-Century Drama and the African Writers Series.

Usage statistics can be accessed through the Administration Resources page (password required – this page is for the use of librarians or local administrators).

[29 June 2006]

Filming Literature competition

Congratulations to the finalists of the Literature Online film competition at the University of Oxford.

The winners this year were Jennifer Aylwin, Samuel Duerden and Sophie Little with their imaginative interpretation of Shelley's The Wine of the Fairies.

Runners-up prizes went to Frances Hamilton and Holly Race's witty film of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and Sian Williams and Ashley Mauritzen's provocative take on Robert Browning's Porphyria's Lover.

Further information about the competition can be found on the Filming Literature page.

[29 June 2006]

MLAIB backfile records added for 1926–1962

The online version of the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) has been expanded to cover the entirety of the bibliography's print run, from 1926 to the present (note: the MLAIB is a premium module which is not available for all Literature Online customers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access). The editorial team of the Modern Language Association has reviewed the complete contents of these thirty-eight print volumes, standardizing almost 11,000 subject names and terms to bring them into line with the Bibliography's current practice and adding consistent title forms and ISSN information for almost 3,500 journals. With these additional 160,000 records, the MLAIB now contains just under 2 million records.

This release also sees the addition of the new 13-digit version of ISBNs to the MLAIB's bibliographic records. Book records now display both 10-digit and 13-digit versions of the ISBN.

[5 May 2006]

Enhancement of MLA International Bibliography search pages.

We have made a number of enhancements to the search pages for the MLA International Bibliography (note: the MLAIB is a premium module which is not available for all Literature Online customers; you can check your subscription profile to see whether your institution has access). The browseable index lists now include 'non-preferred terms' – these are names or subject terms that are not used in MLAIB records because a different term is preferred, such as in the case of a pseudonymous author, where the author's real name is the 'preferred term', but the pseudonym is also listed in the Thesaurus for reference.

For example, if you want to find articles on Mark Twain, you can enter 'Twain' in the 'Author as Subject' field, hit 'select from Thesaurus', and you will find 'Twain, Mark' listed with a cross-reference allowing you to select 'Clemens, Samuel' for searching instead. On the Advanced Search page, the browse lists for subject sub-fields such as Performance Medium and Genre have also been refined, using the controlled Thesaurus lists that are used by the MLA's indexers. To find the MLAIB search pages, select Search: Criticism and Reference from the left-hand toolbar, then select 'Criticism', then 'MLAIB Search'.

[24 February 2006]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

Firefox support: Literature Online can now be viewed using Firefox 1.0 or higher. For more information on browser support, please see the Technical Support page.
Improved Marked List Selection: Literature Online's Marked List is now even easier to use – you can now add items to your list from author, full record and full text pages, as well as from the list of results.

[11 November 2005]

Enhancements to the Literature Online interface

Users of Literature Online will notice a number of enhancements to the design and functionality of the service in this month's release. Many of these have been developed in response to feedback from users. New features include:

Citation Export: from the Marked List, users can now select 'Download Citations' in addition to the existing options for printing and emailing. This allows you to export citations directly into the reference manager software applications EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager or RefWorks, or to save a batch of citations as a plain text file.
'One-Click' Marked List: Literature Online's Marked List is now even easier to use: from results pages in Search Authors, Search Texts or Search Criticism and Reference, you can now add items to your list with one click; the item will be highlighted, and will remain highlighted if it turns up in other search results.
Author Index: this now features an A-Z list of all Literature Online authors. The Author Index is accessible from the left-hand Browse menu, and allows you to browse through lists of authors by Literary Period, Nationality, Literary Movement, Ethnicity or Gender. Literature Online currently includes more than 15,000 authors, of more than 100 different nationalities.
Search Tips: we have added new tips next to key search fields throughout the site. These give examples of how to construct search terms using single keywords, whole phrases, or combinations of terms using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), proximity operators (NEAR, FBY) and wildcard characters (Afric*, wom?n).
Major Anthologies: the Complete Contents page now contains a new heading, which allows direct access to a selection of key historic poetry anthologies. Under the heading 'Major Anthologies of English Poetry', you will now find links to the full text of Songes and Sonettes (1557), edited by Richard Tottel (also known as Tottel's Miscellany), A Collection of Poems (1763), edited by Robert Dodsley, Percy's Reliques (1767), Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), compiled by Sir Walter Scott, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), edited by Francis James Child (known as Child's Ballads) and The Golden Treasury (1891-1897), edited by Francis Turner Palgrave.
Nationality Headings in Complete Contents: new headings have been added to the Texts section of Complete Contents, under 'National and Regional Literatures' to highlight Literature Online's coverage of literature from Wales and Scotland.

[20 July 2005]

Cross-search with Early English Books Online

For customers who have access to both Literature Online and Early English Books Online (EEBO), we now offer a comprehensive cross-searching facility, thus bringing together the two leading textual resources for scholars of Early Modern literature. Searches carried out in Quick Search and Search Texts will now also search the entire set of EEBO citation data: your results will include full results from EEBO, and clicking on any of the items in your EEBO results list will launch the EEBO interface in a separate window.

If your institution has access to the version of EEBO that incorporates keyed full text created by the Text Creation Partnership, you will also see keyword hits from texts within EEBO in your Literature Online search results.

Early English Books Online is a unique collection which contains digital facsimiles of around 100,000 texts printed in English before 1700. In addition to literary texts, the collection encompasses works of history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

[20 July 2005]

Final release of American Drama 1714–1915

The Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collecton American Drama 1714–1915, which is available to users as part of the standard Literature Online subscription, is now complete. 375 plays have been added with this release, including many rare or unique items preserved in the collections of The John Hay Library (Brown University), The New York Public Library, Northwestern University Library, The University of Chicago Library, The University of Iowa Libraries and The University of Michigan University Library. Most are made available as searchable electronic texts for the first time.

Many different dramatic genres are represented in the new release, including farces, such as George M. Cohan's 1913 Broadway hit Seven Keys to Baldpate, sensational melodramas, notably Augustin Daly's Horizon (1885), and naturalist plays, such as James A. Herne's Margaret Fleming (1890). The collection also now offers coverage of the complete printed record of African American drama to 1915, beginning with Ira Aldridge's play The Black Doctor (c.1847), digitised from a rare copy of the 1883 first edition.

Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century, American Drama 1714–1915 provides literary researchers and historians with a comprehensive survey of American dramaturgy from its origins up to the era of sensational melodrama and manners comedy exemplified by the work of such playwrights as David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Clyde Fitch and William Vaughn Moody. The collection is fully cross-searchable by keyword and according to such criteria as genre, date and place of first performance, nationality and ethnicity.

[12 April 2005]

Final release of Canadian Poetry

This final release of Canadian Poetry consists of more than 6,700 poems drawn from more than 240 printed sources. Poets whose works are represented in this new instalment include Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Susie Frances Harrison, Susanna Moodie, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott and Frederick George Scott.

Canadian Poetry has been created and published in collaboration with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries. Now containing more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets drawn from over 700 printed sources, many of them rare and inaccessible outside Canada, the collection comprises essentially the complete canon of English-language Canadian poetry from the seventeenth century up to the early twentieth.

Canadian Poetry is available in its entirety to all users of Literature Online.

[12 April 2005]

Final release of Early American Fiction 1789–1875

Early American Fiction 1789–1875 extends the coverage of the first Early American Fiction collection by twenty-five years (1851–1875) and incorporates the full text of more than 300 additional titles and over 50 new authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, as well as a host of minor writers of the period. In its entirety, Early American Fiction 1789–1875 offers over 730 works of fiction by more than 130 authors, including numerous multi-volume works. In total the collection consists of 882 printed volumes comprising more than 225,000 printed pages.

Among the 79 titles added as part of this final release of Early American Fiction 1789–1875 are Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The latest product of an ongoing collaboration between ProQuest and the University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction 1789–1875 is made available to users of Literature Online as part of the standard subscription.

[12 April 2005]

New search features

In response to usability testing and user feedback, we have added a new 'Search within this journal' link to the Full-Text Journals area of the site, allowing users to move seamlessly from browsing to searching. From Browse: Full-Text Journals, users can click on a journal title in order to browse through individual issues of that journal; from now on, however, you will also see a link to 'Search within this journal' which will take you directly to the Search: Criticism page, with the journal name pasted into the search field, allowing you to search for specific articles or authors within our holdings for that title.

If your Literature Online subscription includes access to the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB), you may also notice modifications to this area of the site. The main new feature is that, for greater ease of use, we have added the 'Author as Subject' and 'Author's Work' fields to the standard MLAIB Search page. Previously, these fields were only accessible on the Advanced Search page; this enhancement gives faster access to targeted searching of key fields within the MLAIB data.

[12 April 2005]

Z39.50 compliance

Literature Online is now compliant with the Z39.50 standard, allowing searching via federated search engines and other remote systems. Information on how to enable searching via Z39.50 can be found in the Administration Resources (password required – this page is for the use of librarians or local administrators).

[12 April 2005]

Cross-search the MLA International Bibliography with Literature Online

In December 2004, we launched the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) as a Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collection, published in partnership with the Modern Language Association of America (MLA). As of February 2005, the MLAIB is now also available as a premium add-on module to Literature Online, allowing users to cross-search the MLAIB with ABELL and Literature Online's entire full-text library. On the Criticism and Reference (Criticism) search page, premium subscribers will now see the following options:

Combined Criticism search page, searching the MLAIB, ABELL and all full-text journal articles
ABELL search page, searching only ABELL records, with links to full text journal articles where available
MLAIB standard search page, searching only MLAIB records, with links to full text where available
MLAIB advanced search page
MLAIB Directory of Periodicals search page

The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) is a leading annual index of books and articles on modern languages and literatures, linguistics, and folklore, which has been published in print form since 1921. The electronic edition covers volumes from 1963 to the present, and comprises more than 1.7 million records, with more than 66,000 new records added each year. Subjects covered include literature from all over the world - including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America - plus the history and theory of linguistics, semantics, stylistics, translation, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts (film, radio, television, and theatre), the teaching of language and literature, rhetoric and composition and the history of printing and publishing. Also included is the MLA Directory of Periodicals, which gives extensive editorial, contact and submission information on more than 7,100 titles.

The Chadwyck-Healey implementation of the MLA International Bibliography has been developed in close consultation with librarians, bibliographers and the MLAIB's own staff. Features include:

Comprehensiveness: the entirety of the MLAIB data is searchable, and the Full Record page displays and identifies every indexed field; the Advanced Search page has 29 search fields and limiters, allowing users to exploit the richness of the MLAIB's subject indexing by building complex searches using fields such as Genre, Literary Influence or Performance Medium.
Supporting information: every search field has an accompanying scope note, explaining the function and contents of that field; full details of editorial policy and searchable fields are given in the Information Centre.
Marked List: users can save citations to a marked list, for printing or emailing (in either short citation or full record format), complete with durable URLs linking back to the Full Record.
Exporting citations: citations can also be exported in a format compatible with EndNote, ProCite, RefWorks and Reference Manager.
Outbound OpenURL linking: customers can use linking software such as Article Linker or SFX to link out from citations to locally held copy.

To see a preview of the stand-alone interface, illustrating the standard and advanced search options, use our step-by-step demo. If you would like pricing or further information, please email pqsales@il.proquest.com (for institutions within North America) or marketing@proquest.co.uk (for outside North America). To request a trial, please fill in the trial request form and we will contact you as soon as this is available.

[28 February 2005]

OpenURL linking

Literature Online now supports both outbound and inbound OpenURL linking at article level. If your institution employs a link resolver, you will be able to follow links from citations in Criticism searches to corresponding electronic full text or local physical holdings of that article. Librarians can enable OpenURL linking by filling in the details of the institution's link resolver on the Customisation page, within the Resources for Librarians area.

Inbound OpenURL compliance means that Literature Online's full-text Criticism holdings can also be searched via a link resolver; users who follow links from other bibliographic resources will be able to retrieve journal full text at article level.

[28 February 2005]

New Poets on Screen

This month's release contains 164 new Poets on Screen video clips bringing the total number in Literature Online to 794. The new clips feature contemporary poets including Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Andrei Codrescu, Fred D'Aguiar, Paul Muldoon, Carl Rakosi, Ishmael Reed and Benjamin Zephaniah reading both their own work and the a selection of works by canonical authors such as Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy and William Blake.

Users can access the whole library of clips from the Poets on Screen link on the left-hand toolbar, or under the 'Multimedia' heading of the Complete Contents page; links to Poets on Screen clips also appear on the relevant Author Pages. In addition, as of this month's release, Poets on Screen clips will also feature in Quick Search results, and new links have been added from the clip page to the corresponding full text of the poem (where available), and vice versa.

[17 December 2004]

Enhancements to navigation and functionality

In response to usability studies and feedback from users, we have added a range of new design features to this month's release of Literature Online, including:

Re-design of the side navigation bar: this now features a new 'Browse' sub-heading, and allows access to both the Author Index and Poets on Screen from every search page.
Search within Texts: Author Pages now feature this new link, allowing you to search within an author's primary works by keyword or title. This is in addition to the existing 'Texts By' link, which returns an alphabetical list of all works.
Results Summaries: the headings that appear at the top of lists of results (such Poetry, Drama and Prose) have been re-designed for extra clarity.

[17 December 2004]

A new interface for the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections

The Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections interface has been fully redesigned and re-engineered to incorporate much of the new functionality familiar to users of the new edition of Literature Online launched in January this year. The earliest collections, such as English Poetry, were first made available via the web in 1996. This new edition delivers the same unique Chadwyck-Healey content through an interface that is more intuitive, more versatile and more responsive to the requirements of today’s users.

The Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections are accessible via the ‘Individual Collections’ link on the Literature Online home page. They allow users to access, browse and search the component collections of Literature Online (such as African American Poetry and Eighteenth-Century Fiction) as separate databases. The following collections, all of them accessible by users of the Literature Online complete collection, have been included in this first phase of redevelopment:

African American Poetry
American Poetry
American Drama 1714–1915
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1920– (ABELL)
Canadian Poetry
Early American Fiction 1789–1850
Early American Fiction 1789–1875
Early English Prose Fiction
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
English Drama
English Poetry
English Poetry, Second Edition
The Faber Poetry Library
Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Twentieth-Century English Poetry
Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Twentieth-Century Drama, which does not form part of the basic Literature Online subscription, is also now available through the new interface.

Highlights of the new interface include:

Research support

Marked List: from List of Results pages you can add selected records to a marked list for emailing, printing or saving.
Easy bookmarking with durable URLs: Author Pages and Full Text pages now have links to 'Durable URL for this page' or 'Durable URL for this text', which give access to durable links that can be used for linking in to the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections from course pages or other web sites.
Information Centre: available from the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections home page, this includes designated resource areas for librarians, academics and students, including sample searches, case studies and information on our text conversion process. The Librarians Resources area also includes the new Administration Resources page, which gives access to usage statistics and library branding features. In addition, each literature collection features its own Information Centre providing MARC records and information about editorial policy.

New search and navigation features

Variant Typography: in English Poetry Second Edition, English Poetry, Early English Prose Fiction and English Drama you can now include early modern typographical variants in your results (so that searches for keywords such as ‘love’ or ‘wife’ will retrieve variant forms like ‘loue’ or ‘wyfe’).
New wildcard operator: as well as the truncation operator (*), users can now use an internal wildcard (?): e.g. 'wom?n' will retrieve both 'woman' and 'women'.
Search History: users can now repeat searches performed earlier in their session or combine them to produce a more advanced search or a more targeted set of results.
Complete Contents: a new feature allowing you to browse through the entire contents of the service and link through to full text.

[30 September 2004]

Enhanced Searching for Poetry

For this month's release of Literature Online we have made numerous changes to the data and search operators in order to allow richer and more sophisticated searches within Search: Texts.

Searching for translated works

Literature Online includes hundreds of translated poems which up until now have only been indexed under the translator's name. However, we have now identified the original authors of many of these poems and re-indexed them accordingly, allowing you to:

compare versions of the Iliad composed by Hall, Chapman, Dryden, Pope and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (tip: search for 'iliad*' in the Title Keyword field, and 'homer' in the Author field)
compare multiple translations of Virgil's Eclogues, or of modern poems such as Baudelaire's 'The Voyage' or Rilke's 'The Unicorn
trace the reception and transmission of major European poets across historical periods: an author like Heinrich Heine, for example, has been translated by poets from William Dean Howells, Emma Lazarus, Amy Levy and Ezra Pound to Les Murray and Tom Paulin
find translations of poems by Sappho, Du Fu, Villon, Goethe, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Anna Akhmatova and many other classic European and world authors.

Enhanced Title Searching

In addition to searching for titles of individual poems and titles of volumes, the Title Keyword search in Search: Texts (Poetry) now also covers selected titles of groups of poems. This includes well-known poem series such as Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Of Experience, Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgement, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. It also includes sub-headings from volumes of collected poems, such 'Dramatic Romances' from Robert Browning's Poetical Works, 'Sea Garden' from H.D.'s Collected Poems and 'Time-Zones' from Fleur Adcock's Poems: 1960-2000. Entering any one of these titles into the Title Keyword field will retrieve all poems within that group.

Genre Indexing of Poems

Genre indexing was one of the many new features added to Literature Online, Third Edition earlier this year. As part of an ongoing project, we have updated our database for this month's release, bringing the total number of indexed poems up to over 20,000.

To use this function, go to the Search: Texts page, select 'Change your search to: Poetry', and click on Advanced Search Options. The Genre field allows you to limit your search to genres such as Ballad, Epic, Ode or Pastoral or to poetic forms such as Sonnet, Heroic Couplets, Ottava Rima or Terza Rima. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding our genre indexing, please contact the webmaster.

[30 September 2004]

Citation support and other new features

In response to user feedback, we have added a range of new features to this month's release, including:

Citation Support: Literature Online now supports the reference manager software packages EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager and RefWorks. The option to download citations in compatible formats has been added to two areas of the site: the Email Records features in Marked List, and the Download Citation option which appears on all full-text pages.
New MARC Records Added: MARC records are now available for full-text journals, Poets on Screen clips, reference works and other material, allowing the Criticism and Reference and Multimedia sections of the service to become fully integrated with your library catalogues.
Level One COUNTER-Compliant Usage Statistics: in addition to the existing set of usage statistics, administrators can now access a separate set of statistics that are compliant with Level One of the COUNTER Code of Practice. This includes reports of article accesses at journal level, turnaways by month and journal, and details of searches and turnaways for the entire database.
Availability of Full-Text Journals: details of coverage and availability for each journal are now clearly displayed on the Full-Text Journals table of contents.

[18 May 2004]

British Poet Laureate praises new edition of Literature Online

Literature Online, Third Edition was officially launched on March 15th by Andrew Motion, the British Poet Laureate. At the event, academics, librarians, publishing partners and representatives from the Modern Humanities Research Association joined the Chadwyck-Healey publishing team in the historic setting of Dr Johnson's House, the London residence in which Johnson compiled his Dictionary of the English Language. Andrew Motion read a number of his recent poems and spoke of the immense value of Literature Online in making great works of poetry available to a large audience. "This is a huge achievement," he said, "and in bringing this significant resource online, ProQuest have done us all a tremendous service."

Several volumes of Andrew Motion's work are available in our Texts collection; in addition, we have just added new clips of Andrew Motion reading his own poems in our unique Poets on Screen collection.

[19 March 2004]

Literature Online, Third Edition

Following extensive international market research and consultation with librarians, researchers and end-users, we are proud to present a fully re-engineered new edition of Literature Online. While Literature Online's exceptional range and depth of content remains unchanged, the service has been given its most comprehensive upgrade since May 1999, with a new, bolder and cleaner interface, more intuitive navigation, new background technology and a range of unique features to meet the needs of current users. For an overview of the new interface, including the key enhancements, use our interactive demo, Getting Started with Literature Online. Highlights of the new service include:

Research support

Marked List: from results pages in Search: Authors, Texts or Criticism & Reference, you can add selected records to a marked list for emailing, printing or saving.
My Archive: a password-protected area in which users can for save searches and search results between sessions.
Easy bookmarking with durable URLs: all full-text pages, Author pages and Tables of Contents pages now have links to 'Durable URL for this page' or 'Durable URL for this text'. These give access to durable links that can be used for linking in to Literature Online from course pages or other web sites.
Author alerts: from each Author page, you can sign up for email alerts to keep you informed whenever new content is added to the service.
Information Centre: includes designated resource areas for librarians, academics and students, including sample searches, case studies and information on our text conversion process. The Librarians Resources area also includes the new Administration Resources page, which gives one-stop access to usage statistics, MARC records, journal details and customisation features.

New search features

Quick Search: a one-box 'smart' search that retrieves results from both Texts and Criticism & Reference.
Streamlined search options: the Find Works and Search Texts pages have been combined into a single Search: Texts page. For the first time you can now search for volume titles, work titles and full-text keywords from the same page. Enhanced search expressions mean that you can also now search for titles within works, including previously unsearched terms such as 'Bartleby' or 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'.
Variant Typography: on the Search: Texts page, you can select 'typographical variants'; this will automatically search for Early Modern variants of your search terms, such as 'loue' or 'wyfe' (instead of 'love' and 'wife').
New wildcard operator: as well as the truncation operator (*), users can now use an internal wildcard (?): e.g. 'wom?n' will retrieve both 'woman' and 'women'.
Literary Works in Journals: Literature Online's collection of full-text journals contains contributions by over 800 contemporary authors. These poems, short stories and essays can now be retrieved via searches in Search: Texts, or by browsing through the Complete Contents.
Poetry genre indexing: from the Advanced Search: Texts page for Poetry, you can now restrict your search to poetic types such as Ballad, Sonnet or Pastoral poem. Genre indexing is an ongoing project, and further poems and genres will be added in future releases.

New navigation features

Complete Contents: a new feature allowing you to browse through the entire contents of the service and link through to full text.
Full-Text Journals can now be accessed from every page in the service.
The Combined Dictionaries search has been expanded into a Reference Shelf, which now includes the King James Bible in addition to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary and the Shakespeare Glossary. This is accessible from every search page.
Author Index: a new interactive browse list of authors, which can also be accessed from every search page.

[28 January 2004]