Comparative Literature Collections

Collecting Goals	General Collections	Rare Book Collection	Other Web Sites
Reference Collections	Media Collections	Related Collections	Library Contacts
Electronic Collections	Microform Collections	UNC Web Sites	Faculty Library Liaison

Collecting Goals:

The comparative literature collections support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature and in other departments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They also serve as a resource for the people of the State.

Reference Collections:

The library has extensive reference materials to support the study of comparative literature. Access to many of the major abstracting and indexing tools, notably ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) Plus Full Text via Chadwyck-Healey's LiteratureOnline and the MLA International Bibliography Plus Full Text via Chadwyck-Healey's LiteratureOnline, is available online. Printed materials are available primarily in the Reference Department of Davis Library. E-Reference materials are a good place to begin the study of comparative literature, while research guides and tutorials facilitate exploration in depth in selected areas. The Reference Department also has software for textual analysis. For further information about reference materials or help using them, please consult the Reference staff.

Electronic Collections:

The Library offers online access to hundreds of thousands of retrospective titles that are important to the study of comparative literature. For English literature they include Early English Books Online (EEBO)and The Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO), which collectively cover 250,000 works published in the British Isles between 1475 and 1800. Early American Imprints I (Evans) and II (Shaw-Shoemaker) contain 75,000 items published in North America between 1639 and 1819. The Literature Online (LION) databases provide access to more than 260,000 fully searchable English and American literary texts, some major reference tools, secondary sources, biographies, bibliographies, and a master index of web sites selected for their quality and range of literary materials. The Library's digitization project, Documenting the American South, focuses on Southern literature, slave narratives, and first-person narratives. Many works of French language and literature are available online through ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language). The other major languages have access to digitized texts on CD-ROMS housed in the Reference Department. Italian has the LIZ (=Letteratura italiana Zanichelli), a full-text database of 362 works and 109 authors from the Middle Ages to the about 1920, on CD-ROM, while Spanish has Admyte, a database of Spanish medieval texts. The Literature Resource Center offers a wealth of critical and biographical information about more than 120,000 authors from the Classical period to the present. It provides several hundred thousand full-text journal articles and other critical essays, thousands of plot summaries and links to authoritative Web sites, over 100,000 author biographies, several thousand author portraits, and the Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Information about electronic journals related to the study of comparative literature is available on a collected list. However, the best way to find information about individual electronic serials is to enter a title search on the Library's "E-Journal Finder" web page. For further information about these titles, please consult the Reference staff. To request a title, please contact the West European Bibliographer.

General Collections:

Comparative Literature studies the literary texts primarily of England, France, Germany, Ancient Greece and Rome, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Latin America, and the United States through a systematic exploration of genres, themes, styles, movements, literary theory and literary criticism. The Library supports these approaches to literary study by providing print collections of works from the standard periods, genres, topics, traditions, and general history of the literatures listed above. The Library also holds most of the works of the major and minor authors of these literatures, including those writing currently. Bibliographies, histories, and critical studies enrich the study of these materials. In response to changing approaches to the study of literature, the Library has made an effort to acquire most works of theory, methodology, and cultural studies published in English and the major western European languages. It has also added titles by and about women, minorities, post-colonial literature, and film. The Library subscribes to a large number of serials indexed in the MLA Bibliography. A list of current print subscriptions in the discipline is available. For further information or to request a title, please consult the West European Bibliographer.

Media Collections:

The Media Resources Center, located in the House Undergraduate Library, has 12,000 feature and documentary films that are accessible by country, title, genre, and director. It also has visual and auditory materials of authors reading from their works. For further information about this collection or to request a title, please consult the Media Resources Librarian.

Microform Collections:

The Microform Reading Room contains thousands of titles on microform that interest faculty and students of comparative literature, particularly collections of American and British literature. Literary manuscripts dating from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, fiction and drama, the archives of several British and American publishers, and periodicals and newspapers from many centuries are available. Similar microfilm resources are available for French literature, while the Bibliothek der Deutschen Literatur provides access to thousands of works in German literature. For further information about microforms or help using them, please consult the Reference staff. To request a title, please contact the West European Bibliographer.

Rare Book Collection:

The Rare Book Collection in Wilson Library, has significant collections pertaining to the study of comparative literature, particularly English literature of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. It also has several collections relating to the study of French and Spanish literatures. For further information, please consult the Curator of the Rare Book Collection.

Related Collections:

Collections in Classics, English, French, , Italian, and Spanish and Portuguese extend library holdings related to comparative literature. Perkins Library, at Duke University, also has extensive collections of these materials. Users can therefore expect to find most of the resources they need in the area. The Center for Research Libraries supplements local library holdings with additional microform collections that may be of interest to faculty and students of comparative literature, particularly foreign dissertations, books and periodicals in languages other than English, newspapers published abroad, ethnic newspapers published in North America, and large microform sets (especially for foreign area studies). UNC faculty and students can request unlimited amounts of materials from CRL via the web and keep them indefinitely, or until another person needs them. For further information, please consult the West European Bibliographer.