English Literature and Creative Writing: Databases

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection

With the purchase of the second and final instalment of the 17th and 18th century Burney newspapers collection, the Library’s digital reach now stretches back to the beginnings of the newspaper as we know it.

This recent release also offers greatly improved reprographic quality on its 2007 predecessor. Largely sourced from the British Library and supplementing existing digital resources such as Eighteenth Century Journals, it offers full text access to almost a million pages addressing the immediate concerns of contemporary society in the Early Modern period. Matters political (both domestic and colonial), cultural and economic can now be easily traced and tracked through a variety of hard-to-find and often short-lived media housed within this major historical archive.

'Topic Finder' and 'Term Frequency' tools allow researchers to trace emerging themes and patterns and the opportunity to develop new and alternative chronologies. 

ProQuest One Literature

ProQuest One Literature is for scholars who must engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research and course planning. It contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. Enhanced by interpretive sources such as book reviews and criticism sourced from wider, interdisciplinary publications in the fields such as humanities and history, it provides diverse, global perspectives with sources from all over the world – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America - the majority of which are in full-text.

ProQuest One Literature gives faculty and students access to millions of sources to meet that need for diversity, functionality and content, including:

A wealth of multi-format resources to help researchers and students gain a deeper understanding of literature. ProQuest One Literature users have access to more than 3 million literary criticism citations, 14,000 dissertations, 20,000 e-books, 1,300 videos and 1,200 full-text journals – so they can fully explore and experience the breadth of content related to their literary research question.

500,000 primary texts written by authors from more than 65 nations, including the ProQuest Black Writing Collection and World Literature Collection, serving the growing numbers of scholars and students who seek a global, diverse representation… alongside works spanning the canon of traditional Western Literature covering poetry, prose and drama from the eighth century to today.

An unprecedented, discipline-specific approach for literary studies research to make researching more comprehensive, relevant and productive for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. Author, work and movement pages serve as “one-stop” entry points for information related to an author, work or movement, and expert indexing brings disparate formats and literary content together in a way that has never been done before.

1.1 million bibliographic citations from the Annual Bibliography of English Language & Literature (ABELL), a renowned index from the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) and a definitive resource for literary criticism.

Cambridge Histories Online

The Cambridge Histories series is one of the most respected reference collections in academia. Now extending to over 400 volumes, titles nominally encompass 10 subject areas: American History; Ancient History & Classical Studies; Asian History; British & European History; Global History; Literature; Middle East & African Studies; Music & Theatre; Philosophy & Political Thought and Religion.  However, it is worth noting that the topics addressed extend across the full range of the humanities, encompassing longstanding series, such as those documenting the history of the major global religions, but also recent innovations such as the World History series, which traces the development and chronology of fields as diverse as Food, Medical Ethics, Sexualities and Slavery. 

Often incorporating contributions by University of Manchester academics, the collections offer invaluable contextual introductions for first-time researchers as well as regular monthly updates on developing areas of scholarship.  The library has recently undertaken a review exercise to ensure online access to all available electronic titles and instituted a subscription for the addition of annual releases to ensure consistent and comprehensive access to this flagship reference series. 

The Cambridge Histories also complement other recent state-of-the art and regularly updated reference material recently added to the Library’s holdings – most notably Oxford Bibliographies and Oxford Research Encyclopedias. 

Archives of Sexuality and Gender

This database, currently the largest portfolio of digital primary source material to address this complex area of cultural studies, encompasses social history, social and political science, psychology, health, and policy studies.

The Library offers access to three diversely sourced collections. The broad expanse of LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 and sex and sexuality from the sixteenth century to the twentieth allow scholars to trace how sexual norms have changed over time, the evolution of public health, changing gender roles, and the ebb and flow of social movements and activism. Researchers can also draw upon a wider pool of material to uncover hidden histories, such as the full text of the landmark Wolfenden report (1957), and the testimonies that underpinned its findings.

The newly acquired, “Community and Identity in North America” archive comprises over a million pages of mainly unique or unpublished material, detailing how identities developed in different social conditions across the Americas. This collection also widens our offer to interdisciplinary groupings such as the Morgan Centre, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the University’s pioneering MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture. 

These collections have been selected to complement our growing reserves in the area – both digital (Gender: identity and social change and Defining Gender) and physical (LGBQT+ holdings in our Special Collections) - with the latter recently boosted by the acquisition of the archive which featured prominently in the ‘Secret Public’ exhibition at the Rylands.

The database incorporates multiple filtering options, including a term frequency tool, which enables mapping of the usage of a word or phrase by content type or popularity over a period of years. Researchers can also cross-search the entirety of the Library’s content hosted on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

The Harper's Bazaar Archive 

The Harper’s Bazaar Archive significantly enhances the University’s existing holdings of one of the world’s most influential fashion and lifestyle magazines. Providing access to over 500,000 pages of content, coverage extends back to the first issues of both the US (1867-present, with subsequent issues added on an ongoing basis), and UK (1930-2015) editions, both of which are seamlessly cross-searchable. 

The resource is fully indexed, and content is discoverable to either article level or, in the case of advertisements, by brand or company name. The highly visual content is presented in the original magazine layout, providing both context and opportunity for comparative studies of both the US and UK editions. The database also complements the University’s recent acquisitions in general interest magazines, notably those available on EBSCOhost Reseach Databases.  

This powerful lens into American, British and International fashion is essential to students and researchers in Fashion, Business and Technology, with cross-searching facilitated between both  Women's Wear Daily and The Vogue Archive by their shared ProQuest platform. However, whilst synonymous with designers and illustrators, Harper’s also showcased the work of acclaimed authors such as John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf and photographers including Diane Arbus and Man Ray. Its diverse cultural range offers rich primary source material for the Departments of American Studies, English Literature and Creative Writing, Film Studies, History, and Sociology, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities including CIDRAL and the Institute for Cultural Practices. 

EBSCO Magazines Archive

The Library has recently secured online access to a significant archival collection of American-based general magazines.  

Renowned for their high-quality photography, impeccable production, and trend-setting design and editorial styles, these collections will hold significant historical value to social and cultural historians, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities. The Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and the Centre for the Cultural History of War will also benefit.   

Accessible on Library Search, the archives are hosted by EBSCO, through which researchers already have access to the Time magazine archives.   

The seven new collections comprise: 

• The Atlantic Magazine (1857 - 2014): Researchers can access primary source material on alternative journalism, addressing activism, the arts, economy, environment and politics.  
• Ebony (1945 - 2014): The most influential African American general interest magazine, articles cover African American culture, business, Civil rights, and entertainment. 
• Esquire (1933 - 2014): Valuable to researchers looking at 20th-Century current events, gender issues, politics and advertising, Esquire also published work by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, fostered the development of the ‘New Journalism’ in the 1960s, and provided early support for the ‘dirty realism’ literary movement of the 1980s.  
• Life (1936 - 2000): This iconic US magazine chronicled the major events of the 20th century and largely defined photojournalism.  
• Sports Illustrated (1954 - 2000): These archives chronicle the evolving role of sports in US culture, from polo and boating to American football and basketball. 
• The Nation (1865 - 2020): America’s oldest weekly magazine was sponsored by Emerson, Longfellow, and Beecher Stowe, its roots stretching back to the Abolitionist movement. 
• Vanity Fair (1919-1936; 1983-2000): Access has been extended to the publication's literary interwar years. The magazine’s later years are valuable to researchers in fashion and marketing, as well as complementing our existing Women’s Wear Daily and Harper’s Bazaar archives on the ProQuest platform. 

National Theatre Collections and a Peake Performance!

The latest addition to the Library’s Drama Online portfolio which completes a collection sourced from over a decade of ‘NT Live’ broadcasts. Now comprising 70 productions, the National Theatre Collections offer a compendium of high quality full-length staged performances stretching from Sophocles to Shakespeare and beyond.  In line with previous releases NT3 is of course readily available to all members of the University of Manchester. The new additions incorporate: “marquee” productions from renowned directors of the calibre of Nicholas Hytner and Lyndsey Turner; literary adaptations from the poet, Carol Ann Duffy and the novelist, Zadie Smith, and acclaimed performances from the likes of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ralph Fiennes, Sophie Okonedo, Catherine Parkinson, and Michael Sheen. To further discovery all new titles - which include ‘Antony & Cleopatra,’ ‘The Book of Dust,’ ‘The Crucible’ and ‘Under Milk Wood’ - are individually indexed on Library Search.

In conjunction with Collection 1 (30 plays) and 2 (20 plays), our NT portfolio complements the Library’s extensive reserves of streamed performances from other major UK theatre houses – including the Royal Shakespeare Company’s RSC Live Collection and Shakespeare’s Globe On Screen.

The Library has also recently acquired a small collection of additional streamed productions of Shakespeare and early modern drama housed on the Drama Online platform, which includes the Royal Exchange’s acclaimed 2014 production of Hamlet with Maxine Peake. 

Collectively these resources form part of the Library’s ongoing collaboration with the Drama and English, American Studies and Creative Writing departments to support the study of performance-based arts in the challenging post-COVID environment. 

Orlando : women's writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present

Emerging out of the Orlando Project, the pioneering self-described ‘textbase’ initiated in the mid-1990s in Canada, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present now constitutes an extensive archive of over 8 million words about women writers, principally British, which seeks to establish a broad literary history centred in women’s production and, through its distinctive infrastructure, resist monolithic or hegemonic readings. In line with the gender fluidity of its Virginia Woolf-derived title, the pool of material offered goes beyond conventional literary genres of poetry, fiction, and drama to encompass writers of science, household advice, or popular genres, travel writing, and cultural critique. The enterprise has been acknowledged as “a watershed project for feminist recovery in digital humanities in general and in digital literary studies in particular” and it continues to generate critical attention in itself.

Entries incorporate contextual timelines for over 1400 authors and their biographies, together with contemporary historical, scientific, medical and legal events, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Orlando’s digitally-encoded and collaboratively-authored model is very much in line with ongoing developments in the digital humanities and similar collaborative practices and thinking can be readily found in the Library’s own approach to Manchester Digital Collections and its use of TEI coding and tagging systems to ensure a plethora of pathways and similar dynamism, as exemplified in ongoing work on the Mary Hamilton Papers. The database also complements the Library’s other evolving electronic reference collections in this area of study, most notably The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing.

Recent additions to the Orlando platform include Teaching with Orlando tips and resources, and a collectively sourced ‘Exhibit’ of project images, as it seeks to further opportunities for ‘remixing’ work on women’s writing through linked data and evolving collaborative systems of text and technology.