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English Literature and Creative Writing: Databases

Close-up of typewriter keys

Databases provide access to high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, dissertations and many other resources. 

These databases have been especially selected for this subject area. When carrying out your research for a piece of work, you will need to search more than one database to find all of the journal articles relevant to your topic, as each database covers different journal titles.

Database Spotlight

Images from EBSCOhost Research Database

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. 

Images of various National Theatre performances

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. 

Promotional image for First Folios Compared depicting Shakespeare and manuscript

First Folios Compared

One of the great treasures of The Rylands, our copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, has long been available online and open access through the  Library Digitised Collections, but we’re delighted to announce it now features in the recently launched First Folios Compared project which brings together over 50 first folios (just over 20% of all known surviving copies) for researchers to examine and explore. It also of course provides another example of the Library’s active commitment to Open Access scholarship.

This project opens up a host of exciting opportunities for close textual examination and work in the digital humanities on an incontrovertibly seminal work, stretching beyond the 36 plays to encompass the physical journeys undergone by the books themselves through the course of 4 centuries - from the amendments of printers to the annotations of owners. Copies from Skipton to Sydney, together with all their extant metadata, are now readily and freely available for viewing and direct comparison.

For more on the Project see the ‘Summary’ in the Details section on the database entry on Library Search.

Header image of Orlando database of Women’s Writing in the British Isles and sample images of layout and tagging systems employed within it.

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.

Front covers from Oberon Books Collection: Baghdad Wedding, Absolute Hell, All Work and No Plays, Collected Works for Performance, Barker Plays One, Alfred Fagon Plays, Grey, The Future Show,, Karen Zacarias Plays

Oberon Books Collection – newly expanded coverage

As a result of heavy usage of the material housed in the initial release of the Oberon ebook collection launched in 2021, the Library has now expanded its coverage to incorporate a second release of some 400 further (individually indexed) titles from this key publisher of plays and books on theatre practice and theory. In additional to canonical texts, the portfolio incorporates an unparalleled range of new writing from the contemporary era, including many significant works and writers that have been excluded from major collections to date. Particularly noteworthy in this release are some 39 plays by Howard Barker, whilst new works by Ontroerend Goed, Deborah Pearson, and Hannah Nicklin are also particularly welcome.  Further evidence of the Library’s ongoing collaboration with the drama department to support performance-based arts in the challenging post-COVID environment, the material will also enhance efforts to rebalance our holdings and offer an opportunity to readily study and research a broader range of plays by contemporary Black and Global Majority artists.

Essential databases

The following are important databases for this subject area, however if you don't see what you're looking for, please go to the Database Directory for English Literature and Creative Writing to browse a wider selection.

 

Database Directory

You can use our Database Directory to browse a broader range of databases that are relevant to English Literature and Creative Writing as well as other subjects. The directory also allows you to identify databases that provide access to specific types of resources (e.g. Full Text Articles, Streaming Video, Patents, Theses and Dissertations, and much more).

Database Directory English Literature and Creative Writing

Research at the University of Manchester

The University of Manchester's research is internationally recognised. Go to Research Explorer, Manchester's research database, to discover the breadth of research produced by staff across the University.

Browse research publications from the Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing (please note: whilst many of the publications listed are available to access/Open Access, some records are for forthcoming titles awaiting publication).

 

Research Explorer Search Interface

 

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