Research Guides: English & Literature: Home

Cowles Catalog Search

Find Journals

This form allows you to browse the tables of contents of scholarly journals and choose full text articles. To search for articles across multiple journal titles, use SuperSearch.

LibKey Nomad

Bring library resources into your research workflow using LibKey Nomad.

Now you can start your research on sites outside the library website, like Google Scholar, Pubmed (yes, even Wikipedia), and the LibKey Nomad browser extension will not only tell you when the library has full text access to an article, it will also provide a direct link to the PDF.

Select your browser extension, set it for Drake University, and start searching!

SuperSearch

Key English & Literature Research Databases

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Premier includes more than 8,992 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
American Fiction, 1774-1920 This link opens in a new window
Primary source archive of prose fiction written by Americans from the political beginnings of the United States through World War I.
Cambridge Histories Online This link opens in a new window
Prestigious Cambridge Histories covering numerous styles and eras of literature.
Dickens Letters This link opens in a new window
The letters of Charles Dickens (1820-1870)
Early English Books Online (Text Creation Partnership) This link opens in a new window
Consists of 25,000+ open access texts from Early English Books Online.
Gale eBooks (formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library) This link opens in a new window
Includes reference materials in the subject areas of: Arts, Business, Education, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation & World, Religion, and Social Science.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Electronic archive of the complete journal runs (excluding the most recent 2-5 years) of over 500 journal titles in over 20 academic disciplines.
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Biographies, bibliographies, and critical analysis of authors and their works from every age and literary discipline.
Literature Resource Center provides biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 160,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world. Literature Resource Center content supports interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities, information literacy, and the development of critical thinking skills. In addition, Literary Resource Center is cross-searchable with other Gale literary products like LitFinder and eBooks from Gale.
LitFinder This link opens in a new window
Literary works and secondary-source materials covering world literature and authors throughout history.
Provides access to literary works and secondary-source materials covering world literature and authors throughout history. Including more than 130,000 full-text poems and over 650,000 poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. Researchers can find texts from the sonnets of Shakespeare to the poetry of Maya Angelou, the love poetry of the 13th century to contemporary poems by African American women, the inaugural speeches of George Washington through Barack Obama, short stories by Edgar Allan Poe to stories by up-and-coming writer Elizabeth Weld, or essays on such subjects as the arts, science, and religion.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Includes “British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture,” which features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the nineteenth century, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These documents, many of them never before available, are sourced from the British Library and other institutions. Curation is by experts in British arts history. British Theatre, Music, and Literature covers more than a century and encompasses both the Georgian and Victorian theatre.

Also includes the “Corvey Collection of European Literature”, which consists of full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises an important collection of Romantic era writing. It includes fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry and more, with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.
Oxford Handbooks Online This link opens in a new window
Full-text online versions of the Oxford Handbooks, available in seven complete subject modules: Business & Management, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Literature, Psychology, and History.

Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
This encyclopedia "provides authoritative and up-to-date information about theatre and performance from ancient Greek theatre to the latest developments in London, Paris, New York, and around the globe.
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Available on-line through Oxford Reference Online this encyclopedia "provides authoritative and up-to-date information about theatre and performance from ancient Greek theatre to the latest developments in London, Paris, New York, and around the globe. In addition to performances in playhouses, it covers dance, opera, radio, film, television, and popular performance, including carnivals, circus, and public executions."
Oxford Reference Online: Performing Arts

Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Full-text of 200 scholarly journals published by Johns Hopkins University and other university presses.
Very Short Introductions This link opens in a new window
Very Short Introductions are concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, and Literary Theory to History.