ONLINE TEXTS AND JOURNALS

From Smith Engravings Collection
Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Library in the History of Chemistry

No information about the source of this engraving has been found.

Online texts that interest Traister are many and varied. With respect to ALL sources listed here, however, users should be VERY CAUTIOUS about the textual authority/authoritativeness of texts available online. That authority, like the weather, will vary--and, also like the weather, with some degree of un predictibility.

Online publishers--even scholarly ones, if they cannot get permission from copyright holders of modern editions--frequently use out-of-copyright editions as the basis for the texts they scan and input. Thus the degree to which their texts might not pass muster with contemporary, or even relatively recent, textual scholars (and this without reference to the imperfections that can be produced by the process of scanning itself) is, too often for comfort, a question they would prefer you did not ask.

Increasingly, you can find scholarship about texts, as well as texts themselves, in electronic form. Its status (refereed? non-refereed?) can raise questions similar to those raised by the editorial practices that underlie online texts. In short: caveat lector .

That granted, several people have been thinking about what these texts, this Home Page, and the web itself are all about. See, for instance:

  1. Vannevar Bush , writing as long ago as 1945, and Martin S. Greenberg , writing nineteen years later
  2. Wendy M. Grossman, net.wars (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
  3. Stanley N. Katz, "A Computer is Not a Typewriter, or Getting Right with Information Technology in the Humanities"
  4. Scholarly Uses of the Web
  5. John Tolva, " Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis : Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word"
  6. Guaraldi.it (English version; a site for a commercial venture where people are thinking about the impact of the web)
  7. James A. Dewar, "The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead" (RAND)
  8. David J. Farber's home page (Penn)

  9. A different view is provided by William H. Gass, "Gutenberg's Triumph: An Essay in Defense of the Book"

An electronic discussion group called HUMANIST exists to facilitate academic consideration of online computing and its uses, including online texts.

Alex: A Catalog of Electronic Texts on the Internet can be consulted via the Web.

The On-Line Books Page from the University of Pennsylvania Library web provides a wealth of resources

Athenaeum: A Free Virtual Library is Zachary Chandler's effort (at Duke University) "to monitor online library projects and provide a convenient gateway to superior sources."

One basic online text (available here to Penn users; guests may apply at the EB's URL, http://www.eb.com/) is the Encyclopedia Britannica . Another is OED . See also the OED site . A specialized dictionary resource (for early modern usage) is The Early Modern English Dictionaries Database .

Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online , a full-text searchable online database, is currently available to people with valid Penn i.p.s

Also available only to people with valid Penn i.p.s is The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism

Two amazingly useful literary sites include:


1. RENAISSANCE LITERATURE: TEXTS AND STUDIES

  1. Generally, see:
    1. Jack Lynch's Renaissance resources
    2. The Online Medieval and Classical Library
    3. Renaissance Electronic Texts
    4. Early Modern Literary Studies: Electronic Texts
    5. See the various "Alchemy"--now called "Luminaria"--databases, which include medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century texts, at http://www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm
    6. Perseus Project (Tufts University; so far [9 May 1997], this is a list of texts planned for inclusion at this site)
    7. Center for Electronic Text & Image (in early stages of development and operation at the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library's Department of Special Collections)
    8. Proper Elizabethan Accents is, as it name indicates, a specialized resource (and can require plug-ins for sound)

  2. The web provides multiple texts of and information about Shakespeare .

    These include texts scanned from early editions in the Horace Howard Furness Memorial [Shakespeare] Library of the Department of Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. Now available are texts that include

    1. the 1623 First Folio Hamlet
    2. the 1619 Quarto King Lear
    3. the 1623 First Folio King Lear
    4. Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear (1681)
    5. King Lear (edited by Alexander Pope, 1723)


    A Useful Teaching Tool for Shakespearians (from The Onion )


  3. Other Shakespearian links-- very numerous, as one would expect--include:

    1. MIT's Shakespeare Home Page . . . and its what's new component;
    2. Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet
    3. Hardy M. Cook (Bowie State University, Bowie, MD -- and SHAKSPER, the e-list for Shakespeare studies)
    4. Sites on Shakespeare and the Renaissance
    5. The McGill Shakespeare Resources Page
    6. The Shakespeare Web
    7. Wiretap's Shakespeare texts
    8. Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre (University of Reading, UK); and Shakespeare Globe USA
    9. Surfing for Shakespeare: English Renaissance Literature on the Web (from Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature straniere, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano)
    10. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy
    11. Materials for the Construction of Shakespeare's Morals: The Stoic Legacy to the Renaissance. Major Ethical Authorities, Indexed According to Virtues, Vices, and Characters from the Plays, as well as Topics in Swift, Pope, and Wordsworth: The Full Texts in English Translation, Scanned, Digitized, Commented on and Annotated (from Ben R. Schneider, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI)
    12. A Midsummer Night's Dream (a hypertext version) and another Midsummer Night's Dream site
    13. The Julius Caesar Site (Tufts University)
    14. Internet Shakespeare Editions
    15. Shake-speares Sonnets (1609) , ed. Hardy M. Cook and Ian Lancashire (Renaissance Electronic Texts [RET 3.1])
    16. Shakespearian Poetry Search
    17. The Folger Shakespeare Library
    18. Internationale Shakespeare Globe Zentrum Deutschland (Universität zu Köln); this is the English-language version of this page
    19. Shakespeare database CD-ROM information
    20. Shakespeare Illustrated ( NOTE : one of the most interesting nineteenth-century artists who also illustrated Shakespeare was Richard Dadd (1817-1886) )
    21. Michael Best's home page
    22. J. M. Massi's Shakespeare course page ; she also has a page for Jacobean drama
    23. Laurie Osborn's home page (with material on writing critically about Shakespeare in hyperspace)
    24. James P. Saeger's NEW home page (with Shakespeare-related syllabi, images, etc.)
    25. Rebecca Bushnell's Home Page (relevant to Renaissance literary studies generally as well as to Shakespeare studies)
    26. Rodger Burnich's Macbeth (and Hamlet ) site
    27. The Hamlet Home Page
    28. Bernice Kliman's Enfolded Hamlet , part of the larger Three Text Hamlet Concordance
    29. Kenneth Branagh's 1996 movie version of Hamlet
    30. Ed Friedlander's "Enjoying King Lear " Page
    31. Cordelia, as King Lear's Fool (a King Lear website)
    32. Shakespeare Festivals on the WWW .
    33. The Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia Inc. is a charitable organisation with a broad charter of the promotion of Shakespearean arts and education in Australia.
    34. Shakespeare Magazine (web version)
    35. Educating Shakespeare: School Life in Elizabethan England
    36. Selected Resources on Shakespeare (from the University of Rochester Library)
    37. EGMA: A page for the study of astrology in the works of Shakespeare (Peter Nockolds, Richmond, Surrey, UK)
    38. Poor Yorick CD and Video Emporium (a commercial site for Shakespeare productions)
    39. Another commercial site is the Arden Shakespeare (see also ArdenNet: The Critical Resource for Shakespeare Studies ); and see http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/shakespeare/welcome.htm for the Norton Shakespeare

  4. contemporary with Shakespeare is Christopher Marlowe

  5. see also the Thomas Middleton Home Page

  6. Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service

  7. Richard Bear's Renascence Editions: Works in English, 1500-1799 (University of Oregon) makes available many works, including (but not limited to):

  8. Also with reference to Sir Philip Sidney , see

    From Geoffrey Whitney, A choice of emblemes . . . (Leiden: Christopher Plantin, 1586), sig. E1 r (p. 38);
    the gift to Traister of Francis O. Mattson

  9. Bibliotheca Augustana (Latin texts: ancient, medieval, post-medieval-- NOTE : "AppleMac et Netscape his paginis optimum visum dant!")

  10. C.E.T.E.: Centre d'Edition de Textes Electroniques (various medieval and later texts, in French)

  11. Schoenberg Center For Electronic Text & Image , The Walter H. And Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania

  12. Renaissance Electronic Texts , already listed above, includes The Elizabethan Homilies 1623 and Robert Cawdrey's Table alphabetical of hard usual English words (1604)

  13. Giovanni Baptista della Porta's Natural Magick (in English translation)

  14. Francis F. Steen's Reftoration Print Culture ( sic ; the site's title uses a swash " f rather than a long " s ")

  15. Is he "medieval" or "Renaissance"? Whatever . . . see Otfried Lieberknecht's Homepage for Dante Studies .

  16. Emblem books:
    1. Alciato's Book of emblems is available online.
    2. See also the Compendio de Emblemas Españoles Ilustrados , by John T. Cull, Antonio Bernat Vistarini, and Edward J. Vodoklys, S.J. (Universitat de les Illes Balears and the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA).
    3. See, relatedly, the Glasgow University Emblem Website . . .
    4. . . . and Emblem Books in Leiden. A Catalogue of the Collections of Leiden University Library .
    5. In addition, you may see Pietro Vasolli da Fivizano's Italian translation of Horapollon's Hieroglyphica (printed by Giolito, Venice 1547) , part of an in-process project to produce a CD-ROM edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia

  17. John Donne

  18. Printed Heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador , sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts (as of September 1996, all English-language), mounted by Professor Hans-Josef Rollmann, Religious Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland

  19. John Dee and the English Calendar (this is a paper about this subject)

  20. For alchemy, see Adam McLean's Alchemy Web Site

  21. Electronic Texts in the History of Medicine (i.e., popular medical works, 16th through 18th centuries), from the Historical Medical Library, Yale University ; see, e.g., Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physitian (1652) .

  22. WWW Virtual Library: History of Science, Technology & Medicine (from the Australian Science Archives Project and the University of Melbourne; texts are from many periods, not the Renaissance only)

  23. See also GGRENir: Internetography on Renaissance intellectual history . This site is organized by Dr. Heinrich C. Kuhn , Seminar für Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The entire site is worth extensive exploration. Of special additional interest may be Kuhn's resources in intellectual history ,

  24. Aemilia Lanyer

  25. Bartleby has mounted, e.g., Chapman's Homer .

  26. Pre-1600 English Balads

  27. The Richard Lovelace Page

  28. Among sites devoted to John Milton are: See also the texts mounted by Richard Bear's Renascence Editions :

  29. Renaissance Texts Research Centre, University of Reading (U.K.) .

  30. Early Modern Literary Studies (the periodical, not the texts, for which, see above).

  31. Elizabethan monetary equivalents

Take special note of Meng Wong's concordance program , which can perform an astonishing variety of tasks with e-texts that have been downloaded in machine-readable form. If you wonder what these tasks might be, read the program's introductory matter carefully.


2. OTHER TEXTS AND STUDIES

Traister's literature page includes sites relevant to many periods and individual authors. The principles by which its listings differ from those to be found here are obscure, even to Traister; they may not, in fact, exist; therefore the curious, the needy, or those with time to kill should look at both places.

  1. The Oxford Book of English Verse , ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch

  2. Representative Poetry On-Line (University of Toronto)

  3. Bartlett's Quotations

  4. Eighteenth-century resources (from Jack Lynch's Home Page)

  5. Anthologies and Miscellanies

  6. The Rape of the Lock Home Page

  7. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

  8. The Hume Archives

  9. William Blake ; see also The William Blake Archive at the University of Virginia

  10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

  11. William Godwin

  12. Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), a gothic novel in HTML

  13. Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1740 edition), a text available experimentally from Chicago's ARTFL Project.

  14. Also available from Chicago's ARTFL Project is Diderot, et al ., L'encyclopédie . See also Dictionnaire de l'Académie, 5th Edition, 1798 (Year VII) ; an ALPHA release of this resource, using a very simple headword search engine, is currently available at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/projects/academie/ .

  15. Various Jane Austen links include:

    Watercolor portrait [of Jane Austen?]
    laid into the University of Pennsylvania's copy of
    Jane Austen, Emma (London 1816)

    1. JaneInfo (Henry Churchyard's wonderful site, with annotated hypertexts),
    2. Melanie Kraft's Jane Austen site , and
    3. James Dawe's Jane Austen site .
    4. Recent Austen movies:
    5. Information is available about the Pride and Prejudice (BBC) broadcast in the USA early in 1996 (A&E).
    6. Broadcast on A&E on Sunday, February 16, 1997 (some repetitions followed, and more may follow yet again), was a generally decent version of Emma (better than the recent movie, until the end).

    Here is the newly rediscovered and Hollywoodized Ms. Austen
    in her most recent portrait:


  16. Greenwood's Map of London 1827 (a slow and pokey link)

  17. American Authors on the Web (from the incredible home page of Mitsuharu Matsuoka , Nagoya University)

  18. Nathaniel Hawthorne

  19. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive (Jerome McGann, University of Virginia)

  20. WOMDA: The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive and the even broader World War I literature site

  21. Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century is part of a larger online Rexroth archive

  22. Christian Classics Ethereal Library --this site, hosted at Michigan's Calvin College, provides access to many medieval and early modern texts, as well as more recent ones--e.g., the Early Church Fathers ; early Church Fathers are also available from a site calleded The Fathers of the Church , which similarly offers many additional basic Christian texts

  23. Bible Software WWW Page ; and Bible Browser

  24. A Digitized Library of Southern Literature: Beginnings to 1920

  25. CAPA: Contemporary American Poetry Archive

  26. The Internet Poetry Archive

  27. Braun and Schneider, The History of Costume ( ca. 1861-1880)

  28. Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo)

  29. The Moore Collection of Underground Comix (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA)

  30. classics in translation ; and see also the classics listings on Traister's literature page

  31. the "wiretap" e-text archive

  32. Bibliomania

  33. Intergo Free Library

  34. Kid A In Alphabet Land: An Abecedarian Roller Coaster Ride Through The Phallocentric Obscurantism Of Jacques Lacan

  35. Bureau of Public Secrets (extensive selections from Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology )


3. SOME GENERAL SITES

Other text resources of interest to Traister can be found on his somewhat fuller list of electronic journals as well as on his more general literature page, mentioned above.

  1. Here is a version of Chadwyck-Healey's Online English Poetry Database available to Penn users only ;

  2. the University of Virginia , provides public access to electronic texts; by contrast, however, Virginia also has this link , which provides severely limited access to texts for non-UVa personnel

  3. Additional information about the product may be found at the Chadwyck-Healey Home Page .

  4. See also the The Electronic Text Center at the University of Vir