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.

213 Full-Text Journals

One new title has been added to Literature Online's library of full-text journals; English in Africa. The addition of this journal brings the total number of titles up to 213. We will continue to add further titles in forthcoming releases, increasing still further Literature Online's coverage of contemporary scholarship in the fields of literary and cultural studies.

This is in addition to the regular update to our Criticism resources: this release contains both new full-text journal articles and new bibliographic records from ABELL, plus, if subscribed, the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB).

[6 June 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.

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.

[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.

When complete, the collection will include 2,600 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.

[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

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:

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 2,600 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 2,500 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.

[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.

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.

[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]