Research Guides @ Fordham: English and American Literature: Pre-1800 Literature

Browsing Pre-1800 Literature

To browse the library's holdings, use the Library of Congress Classification Outline as a starting point.

PN611-649 Literary History, Ancient
PN661-694 Literary History, Medieval (to 1500)
PN683-687 Literary History, Legends
PN688-691 Literary History, Poetry
PN692-693 Literary History, Prose. Prose fiction
PN695-779 Literary History, Modern
PN715-749 Literary History, Renaissance (1500-1700)

Shakespeare

Shakespeare Survey Online This link opens in a new window
Full text of articles from Shakespeare Survey, an annual journal published since 1948.
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1960 and 2011. From Oxford University Press. Note for remote access: after reaching the homepage, click on the (?) in the upper right corner to make sure you see "Welcome, Fordham University"
Click on the "Search and Browse" link to begin your search.
Folger Digital Texts: Shakespeare's Plays, Sonnets and Poems This link opens in a new window
Folger Shakespeare Library, home of the world's largest and finest Shakespeare collection, offers high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and poems.
BBC Shakespeare Plays This link opens in a new window
Videos of 37 Shakespeare plays from Ambrose Digital Publishing.

Recent Books

Deep Time by Noah Heringman
Call Number: (RH) PR448.G475 H47 2023
Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2023]

How the concept of "deep time" began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Literary Authority by Claude Willan (Contribution by)
Call Number: (RH) PR448.P6 W55 2023
Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023.

This book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power.
Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century by David Hopkins; Tom Mason
Call Number: (RH) PR1914 .H67 2022
Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2022.

This volume is a study of how the poetry of Chaucer continued to give pleasure in the eighteenth century despite the immense linguistic, literary, and cultural shifts that had occurred in the intervening centuries.

Pre-1800 Texts

Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Full text of 180,000 books published from 1700 to 1799. Transitioning to a new platform. Not all Browse functions working.
Early English Books Online, 1473-1700 This link opens in a new window
From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this collection contains more than 125,000 books and pamphlets printed in English.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans Digital Edition This link opens in a new window
From Readex. Books, pamphlets, and broadsides published during the 17th and 18th centuries from the bibliography by Charles Evans and Roger Bristol's Supplement.
Parker Library on the Web This link opens in a new window
Manuscripts and documents spanning the sixth-century Gospels of St. Augustine to sixteenth-century records of the English Reformation digitized from Matthew Parker’s Library at Corpus Christi College.
Includes the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890), unique copies of Old English poems and King Alfred's translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care. The Parker Library also contains key Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts, medieval travelogues and maps, apocalypses, bestiaries, royal ceremonies, historical chronicles and Bibles.

English and American Literature: Pre-1800 Literature

Browsing Pre-1800 Literature

Shakespeare

Recent Books

Pre-1800 Texts

Reference & Instruction Department