The study of Literature at MIT is supported by a variety of on-campus and external resources, some of which are listed below. Please note that many of the databases central to literary study are restricted to the MIT community – users require site certificates to access these.
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On-Campus Resources
First and foremost, of course, is Barton, the on-line catalogue for the MIT Library System.
Some Electronic Databases central to the study of literature include:
Project Muse: Offers a selection of top-tier, heavily indexed and widely-held journals in the arts, humanities and social science. Contains complete content of most recent issues, as well as a gradually growing archive of back issues.
JSTOR Scholarly Journal Archive: Contains high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. Spans a number of disciplines, but is not a current issues database (there is a gap of between one to five years between the most recent journal issue and the back issues available here).
ABELL: The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature on line. Contains full texts of both scholarly journals and literary works.
EEBO: Early English Books Online. Contains almost every book printed in England between 1473 and 1700 (over 100,000 of them). All texts have been scanned in as images that can be downloaded from the site or viewed on screen.
MLA International Bibliography: an electronic database that provides the bibliographic information for scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literature, folklore and linguistics. The listing reaches back to 1926 and contains citation information not only of works in English but of articles and books in a number of modern European languages as well. It does not contain the full text of articles and books – though if a book or article is available at MIT, the citation information usually notes the fact and often provides a link to the Barton entry.
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External Resources
We note here a brief selection of useful and interesting archives available online and free of charge.
English Handwriting 1500-1700: a delightful online course allowing you to explore and learn about different types of handwriting through a series of texts that are graded by difficulty level.
Eurodocs: Primary historical documents from Western Europe that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. They shed light on key historical happenings from the broad perspectives of political, economic, social and cultural history.
Project Gutenberg: A library of 20,000 (and growing) free books whose copyright has expired and which are made available in electronic form.
For the period from 1350 to 1700, the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies makes available a number of books and texts, and also maintains a meta-database of links to sites useful for the study of literature in this period at http://www.crrs.ca/library/webresources/webresources.htm.
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