Literature

Access thousands of chapters on major authors, periods and genres, written by experts and designed for student readers.

Explore Credo for trusted reference sources like dictionaries - a great alternative to Wikipedia! 

Watch these short videos to get started:

1. Search tips
2. Using the automated mind map

Access around 200,000 ebooks across all subject areas.

If you need to check what certain terms mean quickly, this site will help.

The most trusted source about words in English, containing definitions, plus very detailed word histories.

Oxford Literature Handbooks offer thorough introductions and a survey of the current state of research on key topics and authors such as adaptations, Arab novelistic traditions, children's literature, ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, war poetry, the Victorian novel, Shakespearean tragedy, Milton, Shelley, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser etc. Chapters review key issues and major debates and indicate how the debates might evolve.

Watch this video about how to make the most of the features available.

A project from the University of California, Davis, which makes available e-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women from 1789 to 1832

No other resource for early modern scholarship is as comprehensive as Early English Books Online (EEBO) with over 146,600 titles and associated bibliographic records. Users can explore complete, digitized images of all the works listed in the key bibliographic records of English literature: The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard & Redgrave, 1475-1640); The Short-Title Catalogue II (Wing, 1641-1700); The Thomason Tracts; and the Early English Books Tract Supplements, as well as original almanacs, pamphlets, musical scores, prayer books and other primary sources.

ECCO is a searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles with over 32 million fully-searchable pages. It is a digitization of the 18th century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project has been recording all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. It also catalogues material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories.

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas.

Access 441 mainly Greek and Latin texts in English translation.

42,000 out-of-copyright books online.

This archive preserves thousands of electronic literary and linguistic resources for use in Higher Education. Texts available range from Treasure Island and Moby Dick to Tristram Shandy and Shakespeare plays.

An international public resource that provides unified access to major works of visual and literary works that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility.

Provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, reports and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
Watch this video for great tips.

JSTOR started as a journal archive but it now offers much more. Jump straight to the articles and chapters on JSTOR which are most useful for Language, Linguistics and Literature topics. You will also find tips about using JSTOR and carrying out research.

A full text database which includes classic and contemporary short stories and poems, classic novels, author biographies, criticism and reviews, synopses and journal articles.

The world's leading source of articles and chapters on literature, language, folklore and related culture.

Watch this video for a quick overview and this video provides tips on searching more effectively

A long-standing, peer-reviewed journal covering major works in English and American literature.

Internationally recognized as the leading, peer-reviewed journal in the field of Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures

An international peer-reviewed journal covering the latest developments in stylistic analysis, the linguistic analysis of literature

The major, peer-reviewed journal covering English and American literature across the 1800s.

The most well-known, American, peer-reviewed journal covering all aspects of literature around the world from medieval to modern - very popular with staff and students in Portsmouth.

A long-standing, peer-reviewed journal covering all areas of English literature and the English language from the earliest period to the present.

Britain's principal international, peer-reviewed journal of radical literary studies. Postcolonial literature, queer theory, Gothic and the work of Jean Rhys, Angela Carter and Charlotte Brontë are just some examples of popular articles in this journal.

Full text articles from many news sources and trade journals both UK and international. Archives sometimes stretching back to the mid 1980s. For use in the UK only.

PressReader lets you access UK and international newspapers, plus a wide range of magazine content. Everything is full colour with archives varying in length depending on the publication.

Login guidance

Search and read a wide range of national and regional newspapers from 1741-1950.

Watch this short video to get a quick overview (we have parts 1 - 5).

Use with care as this tabloid is known for its strong views but it can help with some assignments and certain dissertation topics. Search for stories or use the browse feature to flick through the paper on particular days, including special editions published in connection with Queen Victoria, George V, Elizabeth II's coronation and Winston Churchill. Use Nexis if you want to go beyond 2016.

Search all the newspaper and magazine archives which we buy from Gale Cengage in one go. Once you've done a search, use Term Clusters and Term Frequency on the right of the screen to help you analyse your results or use the panel of options to narrow in different ways.

Access stories and photos from The Guardian (1821-2003) and The Observer (1791-2003). Use Nexis if you want to search up to the current day.

The world's first illustrated weekly newspaper containing useful background for Victorian topics in particular.

Founded in 1903, the Mirror plays a pivotal role in the history of journalism. Peaking in 1967, with a daily circulation of 5.25 million, the newspaper has had a history full of highs and lows. Today, it is the only mainstream left-wing tabloid remaining in the UK. Gale's Mirror Historical Archive, 1903-2000 features more than 800,000 pages of brand-new, full text searchable, scans of the complete run of the Mirror from 1903-2000, including the Sunday Mirror.

Full text articles from many news sources and trade journals both UK and international. Archives sometimes stretching back to the mid 1980s. For use in the UK only.

This online archive includes African-American newspapers as well as titles that pre-date a state's admission into the Union. There is a wide variety of titles and date coverage e.g. Afro-American (Baltimore), Daily Hot Blast, (Anniston, Alabama) Detroit Free Press, The Washington Globe, with the oldest newspaper dating from 1800. There are numerous ways to search or browse.

1271 London and provincial newsbooks, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and single-sheet ephemera, 1600 to 1800.

Launched in 1855 as an affordable newspaper, by 1876 The Telegraph was the largest-selling newspaper in the world. The newspaper was directed at a wealthy, educated readership and is commonly associated with traditional Toryism, despite its more "liberal" beginnings. The Telegraph Historical Archive has over 1 million pages of content and includes the Sunday edition from its inception in 1961. The archive offers a fundamental insight into UK domestic and international affairs and culture.

During the twentieth century, The Telegraph cemented its reputation as a pioneering yet reliable source of news reporting. There was the infamous uncensored interview with Kaiser Wilhelm of 1908, in which he successfully alienated Britain, France, Russia, and Japan. In 1942, the newspaper published the cryptic crossword puzzle responsible for recruiting Allied codebreakers during the Second World War.

Search over 200 years of articles. Articles are full facsimiles of what was published on the day and you can view the article in its original page location if you want.

Watch this video showing you how to make the most of the features available.

A collection covering the growth of readership, including magazines for women, children and leisure interests.

The text of 460 journals published between the 1680s and the 1930s. This archive includes millions of facsimile pages from a wide range of publications from scholarly and professional titles through to art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.

Access the full text of popular entertainment industry magazine archives, including New Musical Express, Variety, The Stage and Screen International.

Originally known as The London Gazette, this was the first official journal of record and the newspaper of the Crown. The Gazette became an authoritative and reliable source of news. Today, The Gazette is divided into service-specific areas of interest: Wills and Probate, Insolvency and the All Notices board; with sector-related guides, industry news and other useful resources encouraging users to tailor searches. To access historic content from 1665 onwards, use the column down the left where there is a publication date option.

Search the backfiles of leading women's magazines from the late-19th century through to 2005. Titles include Company, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Prima, Seventeen and She from the UK and Canada. If you want to search just the UK versions, go to Advanced Search, then scroll to Place of Publication and tick London. Access more recent content via PressReader.

An archive of UK television and radio programmes from free to air channels (1998 onwards). For use in the UK only. Find some great tips about how to use BoB in these short videos.

Watch high quality films of leading theatre productions. Discover how plays are brought to the stage in interviews with the creative teams. Learn about interpretive choice through detailed analysis of play texts.

Watch this 5 minute video for an overview of the content and how to navigate it.

This resource is restricted to members of the University of Portsmouth

You have two ways to access the login instructions:

1. Contact the Library from any Library enquiry desk or by contacting us:

• Email: library@port.ac.uk
• Tel: 023 9284 3228

2. Connect to the University VPN and use the link below:

View restricted access information for resources

To verify you are a University member, please use your university email account or include your student/staff number in your message. If calling, please have your student/staff card ready.

A unique collections of films including award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases on every topic imaginable. Content can be searched or browsed.

National Theatre Collection: Volumes I & II bring the stage to life through access to high-definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies. Through a collaboration with the U.K.'s National Theatre, the collections offer a range of digital performance resources never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive. 

Themes covered include: childhood and family, objects, food, disability, the body, the home, women, dress and fashion, theatre, animals, the sea, work, leisure and consumption etc. Each theme goes from antiquity through to the 21st century. You can search by time or place as well as by theme.

This archive comprises more than 2 million pages from manuscripts, books, broadsheets, and periodicals. It unites a number of disciplines, from law, criminology, and history to studies of popular culture and fiction. The full story of a notable crime can be revealed via court transcripts, prison and transportation records, petitions, police advertisements, collections of newsprint cuttings, ballad broadsheets, and criminological comment. Digitally available for the first time is a wealth of English archival crime material, both rural, as with the Althorp papers, and urban, with collections of police correspondence from London and Manchester. The extensive notebooks of English judge John Duke Coleridge have also been digitized, and also collections of police correspondence from London and Manchester.

The collection covers Europe, North America, India, and the Antipodes and includes material in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.

This short video gives tips about using the archive.

Explore five centuries of primary source material documenting the story of food and drink. The materials in this collection illustrate the deep links between food and identity, politics, power, gender, race, and socio-economic status, as well as charting key issues such as agriculture, nutrition, and food production.

You can access printed and manuscript cookbooks, advertising ephemera, government reports, films, and illustrated content revealing the evolution of food and drink within everyday life and the public sphere. The unique material in this collection has been sourced from across the globe to reflect a wide range of food cultures and traditions.

Access a range of primary and secondary sources covering London from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. As well as documents, you will find interactive maps, illustrations and photographs to really bring the streets to life.

Explore documents, fanzines, photos and newsreel footage to help understand these key decades when consumer culture and pop music took off and protest movements were big news.

An essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries containing everything from full-text books, to posters and performance tickets.

Watch this 90 second video about how to store items for later use.

A brilliant source containing essays, maps, primary sources and an interactive chronology on the theme of Empire across the last 5 centuries

Read in-depth coverage about empires across the world from ancient to modern times. Entries include the Suez Crisis of 1956, the partition of Africa, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dutch East Indies, propaganda and empire, decolonization in the French and British empires, postcolonialism and much more.

A wide ranging archive which includes US Supreme Court records, books, pamphlets, newspapers and facsimiles of letters by the English abolitionist William Wilberforce etc

Explore 20 collections of documents, including minutes of meetings and conferences, press releases, fliers, brochures, press clippings, US government memoranda and reports, private correspondence, surveys and photos.

Watch this quick introduction to the archive - please note we only subscribe to Part 1 which contains British material as well as coverage from North America.

Explore primary sources for gender history, women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men's movement, the body, domesticity and the family. The records available include some from pressure groups giving details of 20th century lobbying and activism.

Watch this 40 minute webinar to understand more about the content available.

An extensive range of primary and secondary sources, plus thematic essays on multiple aspects of feminism from 1776 to 1928.

Access a digitised collection of annual reports, pamphlets and newspapers held at the LSE but made available to everyone.

If you want to trace details about a specific person or place, or perhaps need inspiration for creative writing, this could be just what you need! Connected Histories provides an all-in-one search across electronic content available on various sites such as 19^th Century British Pamphlets, the Clergy of the Church of England, Charles Booth Archive, Convict Transportation Registers, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, British Newspapers 1600-1900 etc. If you find something useful on a resource we pay for e.g. British Newspapers, you may need to follow the link to that resource from the Finding Articles page within these Subject Pages.

A cultural gateway into over 50 million digitised documents, maps, images and newspaper archives from across Europe. Thematic collections include World War I, fashion, industrial heritage, personal stories and sport. Special newspaper collections include issues covering the Paris World Exhibition of 1889, World War I and Eastern Europe in 1989.

An online archive of just under 68,000 printed items covering aspects of everyday life in Britain in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. You will find posters and handbills for theatrical and non-theatrical entertainments, broadsides relating to murders and executions, book and journal prospectuses, popular topographical prints, and a wealth of different kinds of printed advertising material.

Watch this short video introducing the collection.

This archive contains primary sources covering the development of urban centres and the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The collections offer an understanding of key events such as Chartist agitation, Anti-Corn Law disturbances, the Peterloo massacre and tensions underlying policy formation and the nature of Victorian government. Home Office records reflect the varied responsibilities of the Home Secretary's office, including petitions to the Crown, appointments to public offices, disturbances and sedition, inventions, poor relief, prison administration, public health, public order, and the universities.

Get an overview in this short video.

The national record of over 60,000 biographies, 72 million words, 11,000 portraits of significant, influential or notorious figures who shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century - extremely useful for detailed biographies about literary figures.

A set of online research tools - including chronologies, indexes, concordances and bibliographies - created by academic experts for the study of the Romantics, their contemporaries, and their cultural contexts.

Search or browse one of the most detailed primary sources for the history of Britain and its former colonies. Reports from military officers serving abroad are included, as well as Command Papers, Bills, Committee reports. Hansard is available from 1803-2005. (See UK Parliament link if you need more recent papers.)

A highly-rated American academic site about all aspects of UK Victorian literature and culture. You will find primary and secondary texts (including scholarly book reviews) covering Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts (painting, architecture, sculpture, book design and illustration, photography, decorative arts, including ceramics, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, stained glass, and textiles, costume and various movements, such as Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and Arts and Crafts).

Details about the life and work of this important nineteenth century figure. Links to his work are included as well as full-text, critical articles about his work.

This is a book and website aimed at those looking for guidance as they encounter big data for the first time and who wish to actively create and interrogate digital data.

This enables you to discover new insights across online archives with text and data mining resources, visualization tools, and methodology suggestions. The incremental process of Build, Clean, and Analyze supports newcomers and experienced users alike as they interpret both Gale Primary Sources and their own documents.

For a quick overview to understand what Digital Scholar Lab can do, watch this 2 minute video. For deeper understanding of each stage of the process, there are a whole set of videos here.

This is an open access, peer reviewed journal of methodology for digital historians. It contains lessons on skills, technology and tools, plus a blog.

Access a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions. Covering more than a century, British Theatre, Music, and Literature is without equal as a resource for 19th century scholars. The collection provides a detailed look at the state of the British art world with, for example, not only manuscripts and compositions, but also documents such as personal letters, annotated programs, meeting minutes, and financial records, offering scholars an unmatched glimpse into the inner workings of the arts world and life in Victorian Britain.

Papers, notebooks and casebooks from the survey into London life and labour, 1886-1903. Booth family papers are also included.

This site presents the original illustrations from Charles Dickens’ Novels. It is a a project of Dr Michael John Goodman, a freelance researcher - see the About section for further information.

If you want to trace details about a specific person or place, or perhaps need inspiration for creative writing, this could be just what you need! Connected Histories provides an all-in-one search across electronic content available on various sites such as 19^th Century British Pamphlets, the Clergy of the Church of England, Charles Booth Archive, Convict Transportation Registers, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, British Newspapers 1600-1900 etc. If you find something useful on a resource we pay for e.g. British Newspapers, you may need to follow the link to that resource from the Finding Articles page within these Subject Pages.

This archive comprises more than 2 million pages from manuscripts, books, broadsheets, and periodicals. It unites a number of disciplines, from law, criminology, and history to studies of popular culture and fiction. The full story of a notable crime can be revealed via court transcripts, prison and transportation records, petitions, police advertisements, collections of newsprint cuttings, ballad broadsheets, and criminological comment. Digitally available for the first time is a wealth of English archival crime material, both rural, as with the Althorp papers, and urban, with collections of police correspondence from London and Manchester. The extensive notebooks of English judge John Duke Coleridge have also been digitized, and also collections of police correspondence from London and Manchester.

The collection covers Europe, North America, India, and the Antipodes and includes material in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.

This short video gives tips about using the archive.

The world's first illustrated weekly newspaper containing useful background for Victorian topics in particular.

Access a range of primary and secondary sources covering London from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. As well as documents, you will find interactive maps, illustrations and photographs to really bring the streets to life.

This archive contains primary sources covering the development of urban centres and the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The collections offer an understanding of key events such as Chartist agitation, Anti-Corn Law disturbances, the Peterloo massacre and tensions underlying policy formation and the nature of Victorian government. Home Office records reflect the varied responsibilities of the Home Secretary's office, including petitions to the Crown, appointments to public offices, disturbances and sedition, inventions, poor relief, prison administration, public health, public order, and the universities.

Get an overview in this short video.

Discover what life was like for the poorest communities in Victorian Britain, and explore the government policy, social reform movements and philanthropic efforts of charitable institutions that sought to alleviate poverty. This archive offers a multi-dimensional portrait of poverty from the perspectives of central state officials, local bureaucrats and inspectors, social policy makers, politicians and people working in private voluntary organizations. Documents cover the complex social climate of 19th and early 20th century Britain between the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834 and the abolition of the workhouse system in 1930.

For a quick overview, watch this. If you want an in-depth introduction to this resource, watch this 1 hour webinar (information about this specific resource starts at 8 min 30 secs).

London's Central Criminal Court records 1674-1913 - just under 200,000 trial details are available.

As the 19th century opened in Britain, William Paley published his Natural Theology (1802), a text that seemed to successfully integrate 18th century natural science and religious belief into a sophisticated scheme proving that the universe demonstrated its own divine design. Liberal Christianity, however, would not go uncontested. The 19th century, instead, was punctuated by economic, social, and intellectual events that birthed two powerful waves of evangelical revival waves that in turn sparked highly influential religious and secular responses of a rationalist, philosophically organicist, or countercultural character. These disruptive events included the demographic upheavals of the early and second industrial revolutions, the mid-century revolutionary political upsurges of 1848, early trade union activity, stratigraphic geology spawned by the mining industry, and the natural selection thesis forcefully argued by Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859). All three types of intellectual response were associated with powerful impulses toward moral or social reform. It is impossible to consider the topic of religion in the long 19th century without considering its relationship to the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, temperance, conditions of labor, utopian experiments in living, missions to aid the poor, and the emergence of Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel movement, which this collection illustrates.

Search or browse one of the most detailed primary sources for the history of Britain and its former colonies. Reports from military officers serving abroad are included, as well as Command Papers, Bills, Committee reports. Hansard is available from 1803-2005. (See UK Parliament link if you need more recent papers.)

An essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries containing everything from full-text books, to posters and performance tickets.

Watch this 90 second video about how to store items for later use.

A highly-rated American academic site about all aspects of UK Victorian literature and culture. You will find primary and secondary texts (including scholarly book reviews) covering Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts (painting, architecture, sculpture, book design and illustration, photography, decorative arts, including ceramics, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, stained glass, and textiles, costume and various movements, such as Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and Arts and Crafts).