English Collections

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

Collecting Goals:

The English and American literature collections support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of English and in other departments and programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They also serve as a resource for the people of the State. The collections are particularly strong in the areas of specialization within the English Department.

Reference Collections:

The library has extensive collections of reference materials in all formats to support the study of English and American literature. Many of them are available online, including 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, the major indexing and abstracting tools for the field. Printed works are located primarily in the Reference Department of Davis Library. The Library also has an unusually large number of manuscript catalogs. E-Reference materials are a good place to begin the study of English or American literature, while subject 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 Resources:

The Library offers online access to hundreds of thousands of titles that are important to the study of English and American literatures. 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 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, also available online, focuses on Southern literature, slave narratives, and first-person narratives. 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 British and American Literature can be found 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. Many newspapers are now available in electronic format. They appear as separate entries under "News" in "Article Databases and More" and include the New York Times Historical Newspaper. The Library has a few titles in CD-ROM format that are relevant to the study of English. For further information about these titles, please consult the Reference Department. To request a title, please contact the Humanities Bibliographer.

General Collections:

The Library's print collections support the study of the standard periods, genres, topics, traditions, and general history of English literature and language. The Library holds most of the works of the major and minor authors of American and British literature, including those writing currently. Bibliographies, histories, and critical studies enrich the study of these materials. In addition the Library has significant resources on philology, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing. The Library has acquired most works of theory, methodology, and cultural studies published in English and the major western European languages. It has also added titles that fall into other categories, especially those by and about women, Latino/a and other minorities, and post-colonial and Commonwealth literature. African American literature and Southern literature, in particular, are areas of strength for both the Department of English and the Library. The collections include many specialized works published by Southern presses and a number of Southern literary magazines that are not widely held in other libraries. The Library subscribes to a large number of serials indexed in the MLA Bibliography and many little magazines listed in the Index to American Periodical Verse. A list of current print subscriptions in the discipline is available. For further information or to request a title, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.

Media Collections:

The Media Resources Center, in the House Undergraduate Library, has 12,000 feature and documentary films that support courses taught in the English Department. It also has visual and auditory materials of authors reading from their works. For further information about this collection, please consult the Media Resources Librarian.

Microform Collections:

The Microform Reading Room contains thousands of titles on microform that support teaching and research in British and American literature, particularly collections of fiction and drama. Literary manuscripts dating from the Renaissance to the twentieth century are also available, as are the archives of several British and American publishers and periodicals and newspapers from many centuries. For further information or to request a title, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.

Rare Book Collection:

The Rare Book Collection in Wilson Library has significant holdings of materials pertaining to the study of English and American literature, particularly English literature of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Most notable among them are John Gower's Confessio Amantis printed by William Caxton (1483), Anne Bradstreet's Several Poems (1678), a Second Folio of William Shakespeare, the Johnson-Boswell Collection, and the Henderson-Shaw Collection. Other strengths include the American Pulp Fiction Collection, the American Theater Collection, the Lord Byron Collection, the Civil War Novels Collection, the Confederate Imprint Collection, the Charles Dickens Collection, the Robert Frost Collection, the Sherlock Holmes Collection, the C. S. Lewis Collection, the Mystery-Detective Collection, the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Collection, and the William Wordsworth Collection. The collections are also exceptionally strong in the works of the American authors Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and British authors Samuel Becket, Edmund Burke, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Hugh MacDiarmid, John Ruskin, William Shakespeare, Algernon Swinburne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Several collections of publisher file copies are also available, including the J. M. Dent Collection of Imprints and Production Materials, the Grove Press Imprint Collection, the John Murray/Smith-Elder Imprint Collection, and the Ticknor and Fields Imprint Collection. For further information, please consult the Curator of the Rare Book Collection.

North Carolina Collection:

The North Carolina Collection has rich collections of literary materials by North Carolina authors. Foremost among them is the Thomas Wolfe Collection of correspondence, published items, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia by and about Thomas Wolfe. Other North Carolina authors are also well represented in the collections with original printed works, critical and biographical studies, dust jackets, and promotional materials. A collection of literary magazines from North Carolina, book reviews and literary criticism (the "literary scrapbooks"), and an imprint file for items printed in North Carolina through 1880, with access by both date and place of publication, provide additional resources for faculty and students. For further information, please consult the reference staff of the North Carolina Collection.

The Manuscripts Collections:

The Manuscripts Department contains the manuscripts of over thirty authors with North Carolina ties. Not all are natives to the state. Some, like Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, studied at UNC-Chapel Hill. Others like Paul Green and Clyde Edgerton are closely identified with their home state. There are also some manuscripts by other authors, notably John Ruskin and G. B. Shaw. Another area of strength in terms of literary collections is the Manuscript Department's holdings of publishing archives. They include material from A. P. Watt and Company, Algonquin Press, J.M. Dent & Sons, and the University of North Carolina Press among others. For further information, please contact the Manuscripts Department.

Related Collections:

Collections in African American studies, American studies, communication studies, comparative literature, folklore, history, linguistics, Southern Americana and women's studies extend library holdings related to English and American 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 of English and American literature. For further information about library collections, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.