Web Resources for

British Literature (1660-Present)

(Compiled and maintained by Professor Karin Westman.)

Below you'll find web links for British history and culture, literary movements, and for the authors we're reading this semester. Some sites are better than others; as always when using the web, evaluate not only the quantity of the information presented, but its quality (the source of that information or its sponsor, date uploaded, etc.).

British History and Culture | General Literary Resources | Authors

British History and Culture

Historical Background

• Peter Williams' Narrative History of England (from Britannia).
• The Houses of Parliment homepage provides information on the United Kingdom's Parliment, including the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The "Introduction to Parliment" page has links to resources on the buildings, history, laws, procedures, and people of Parliment.
• The Eighteenth-Century England site (University of Michigan) features various resources on 18th c. life, including resources on food, army life, advertising, and marriage.
• The BBC's "History Trail" for Victorian England offers a range of information about every-day life in England during the 19th century, including a section on "The Ideals of Womanhood."
• Wilfred Owen Multimedia Archive: an on-line archive with material on Wilfred Owen and WWI which offers an incredibly deep resource, including digital facsimiles of all of his war poetry, a selection of his letters and photographs, and his personal records. In addition, the archive has c.50 Video Clips from the 1916 films 'The Battle of the Somme' and 'The Battle of the Ancre: The Advance of the Tanks' (QuickTime and MPEG); 100 Audio Clips from interviews with veterans from the Great War [needs a RealAudio Player]; 250 Photographs of the Western Front (1914-1918); 250 Modern Photographs of the Western Front; and c.30 Modern Video Clips of the Western Front. (Most of the photos were taken from the collections of the Imperial War Museum.)
• The Partition of India provides maps before and after partition, a timeline of British presence in India (1600-1971), a discussion of the reasons for partition, and further resources.
• Also see the General Literary Resources below for more information on post-imperialism and post-colonialism.

Cultural Contexts

Art

• From Realism to Post-Impressionism: Take a look at a series of paintings that trace the developments in art from the mid-19th century to c.1920.
• The "Time Line of Art History" (sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum in NY) has detailed discussions of impressionism and post-impressionism.
• A glossary of painting styles, including descriptions of impressionism and cubism.
• Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury, an online exibit at the Tate Gallery, provides information about this influential group of artists and writers.
• View Picasso's famous Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

The Booker Prize

• A site devoted to the Booker Prize offers a history of the Booker Prize, founded by Booker plc, Britain's leading national food wholesaler. The site also includes short-listed authors, winners, and panel judges for recent years.
• A discussion of the Booker Prize, including the marketing and publicity around the prize, the panel of judges, and some recent winners.

Current Media

• The Times and The Sunday Times.
• The Independent.
• The Guardian and The Observer.
• The Irish Times.
• The Scotsman.
• The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

Fashion and Costume

• The Costumer's Manifesto has links to many images of 18th century dress and 19th century Regency and Victorian dress, for men, women, and children.
• For dress c.1700-c.1735 -- the time of Pope and Swift -- see "The Clothing of Eighteenth Century England."
• For fashions of 1803, view an animated slide show of prints from the Journal des Dames et des Modes at Victoriana Magazine.

Landscape Gardening

• For information on 17th and 18th c. landscape gardens, try the Stowe Landscape Garden page (provides links to designers and sculptors affiliated with Stowe, including images of their work) and Sisley Garden Tours and its "Directory of botanists, plantsmen, ," which offers brief biographical sketches of designers such as Le Notre, Kent, and "Capability" Brown.
• Professor Robert Viau's "Eighteenth-Century Garden History" provides a detailed and well-illustrated look at the developments in landscape gardening during the 18th century in England, as does a site on "Georgian Gardens."
• Read about the Enclosure Acts in the 18th century, which transformed the countryside, and about the many styles of hedges used around England.

General Literary Resources

• Alan Lui's Voice of the Shuttle webpage for the Restoration and the 18th century, the Romantics, the Victorians, English Literature -- Modern, and English Literature -- Contemporary.
• Norton Topics Online provides some cultural context to accompany readings in their Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Resources

• Romantic Chronology, edited by Professors Laura Mandell and Alan Liu, is an incredibly powerful resource, since it allows you to search by date to retrieve hyperlinked information about the period's authors or events. You can also search the site by topic.
• Eighteenth Century Resources, edited by Professor Jack Lynch, provides a search engine to search the site for key words as well as offering pages organized by topic. The Literature page has links to general resources, bibliographies, and individual author pages.
• Age of Enlightenment, edited by Professor Nancy B. Mautz, offers resources on British, American, and European contributions to 17th and 18th century thought and culture. Resources are organized by topic, including History (people, places, events) and Art (art and architecture, literature and drama, music and dance, daily life and culture).
• Eighteenth Century Studies provides an extensive list of links to e-texts of works by eighteenth-century authors, organized by author and topic. Some bibliographic information, too.
• For cultural context, visit the Eighteenth Century England site (University of Michigan).

Nineteenth-Century Resources

• The Victorian Web offers a comprehensive overview of Victorian history and culture.
• The BBC's "History Trail" for Victorian England offers a range of information about every-day life in England during the 19th century, including a section on "The Ideals of Womanhood."
• The Internet Library of Early Journals provides a digital library of 18th and 19th century journals, scanned page by page. Journals in the collection include: the Annual Register, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and The Builder.

Modernism Resources

• A comparison of Victorian and Modernist ideas and some characteristics of modernism.
• Visit my resources for The Bloomsbury Group for additional information.

Contemporary Resources

• Visit my extensive resources for Contemporary British Literature.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literary Resources

• George Landow's Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English site is uneven, but can provide some helpful historical context and critical commentary. (The Postimperial Literature in English part of this larger site links to information on UK authors.)
• The Imperial Archive, a "site dedicated to the study of Literature, Imperialism, Postcolonialism" and authored by students working on the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast.
• An Introduction to Postcolonial Studies at the site for Postcolonial Studies at Emory.
• The Norton Topics Online pages on "Victorian Imperialism" provides a clear discussion of the terms imperialism and colonialism.

Postmodernism

• Detailed discussion of metafiction and historiographic metafiction.

Popular Literature Resources

• Stanford University's Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls provides information on its Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection, stories which were popular from the middle to the close of the 19th century in England and America.

Authors

Chinua Achebe

Matthew Arnold

• The Victorian Web provides a series of links on Matthew Arnold, including a biography and a discussion of Arnold's views on religion.

Aphra Behn

• The Aphra Behn Page offers a chronology of Behn's life and works, links to online texts, and information about women in Restoration theater.
• The Sign of Angelica: An Aphra Behn Web Site provides a conversational biography and overview of Behn's life.
• The Aphra Behn Society page has links to sites with biographical information, as well as links to electronic versions of Behn's works.

Rupert Brooke

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Robert Browning

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• The Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive (sponsored by the University of Virginia Library) has links to e-texts of Coleridge's work and to a timeline of Coleridge's life, among other resources.
• A brief biography of Coleridge.

Joseph Conrad

• The Victorian Web provides pages on Conrad, including a biography and information about the initial publication of Heart of Darkness in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February, March, and April of 1899.

T. S. Eliot

• The Academy of American Poets page on T.S. Eliot and a page devoted to T.S.Eliot and modernism in an exhibit titled "The Modernist Revolution".
• A hyperlinked annotated version of "The Waste Land" (in progress).

George Farquhar

• An engaging biography of Farquhar, written in 1906, provides information about his life and his work.

Thomas Hardy

Seamus Heaney

• The Seamus Heaney page at UNC's Internet Poetry Archive offers biographical and bibliographical information, as well as Heaney's Nobel Lecture.
• Reviews and articles about/by Heaney in the NYT.
• Photos of the "Windeby Girl," the inspiration for Heaney's poem "Punishment," as well as the body of a sixteen year old Yde girl and the Tolland man, all recovered from the bogs.
• A page of critical readings of some Seamus Heaney's poems, designed to help students prepare for the GSCE exam in the UK.
• Listen to excerpts from BBC Four interviews with Heaney.

Samuel Johnson

• Professor Jack Lynch's page, "A Guide to Samuel Johnson," has links to a brief biography and other resources on Johnson.

John Keats

Philip Larkin

• Detailed biographical and bibliographical information at the University of Hull, the location of Larkin's papers.
• Biography and select bibliography at the Academy of American Poets site.
• "High Talk: Influences from the British Isles" (also at the Academy of American Poets site) places Larkin within the context of other U.S. and British poets of his day.

John Stuart Mill

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

• Renascence Editions offers a biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, as well as annotated e-texts of selected poems and prose.
• The entry for Montagu at Britannica.com provides biographical information and a picture.

Wilfred Owen

• Wilfred Owen Multimedia Archive is the best resource for information on Owen and WWI. Its pages provide an incredibly deep resource, including digital facsimiles of all of his war poetry, a selection of his letters and photographs, and his personal records.

Alexander Pope

• A biography of Pope with links to portraits of the artist provided by S. Constantine (University of Massachusetts).
• The Alexander Pope Page has a later portrait of Pope as well as links to e-texts of his work.
• Another portrait of Pope in later years.

Christina Rossetti

• The Christina Rossetti page at the Victoria Web places Rossetti's life and her works in the context of the Victorian period.
• The Victoria Web also has a page dedicated to Rossetti's "Goblin Market," including the text of the poem alongside some of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's illustrations for his sister's work. You can also go directly to links for selected illustrations for "Goblin Market" by Rossetti and by Lawrence Houseman.

Siegfried Sassoon

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• The Victorian Web jumps back a bit in literary history to offer resources on P. B. Shelley, including a biography.

Mary Shelley

• The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Chronology and Resource Site has a complete and detailed chronology of Mary Shelley's life as well as a bibliography and selected links to other web resources. Of special note: Sir Walter Scott's review of Frankenstein (1818) in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (2 [20 March/1 April 1818]: 613-6) and the chronology of Mary Shelley's life for 1797-1816 and for 1817-1824.
• View Henry Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare" (1781) which may serve as a source for the scene of Elizabeth Lavenza's death. An alternate version of "The Nightmare" (1781-1782) exists as well.

Wole Soyinka

• The "Wole Soyinka" page at the site for Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English, has links to short critical commentaries as well as some historical and political contexts for Phillips' work.
• A biography of Soyinka and an overview of his literary work and artistic practice, with links to a bibliography and interviews, sponsored by the Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts.
• A detailed interview with Soyinka (16 April 1998), sponsored by the "Conversations with History" series at U of California Berkeley; the subjects range from Soyinka's early years to his work for the theater and his political activism.
• Listen (or watch) Wole Soyinka read his work at Harvard's Du Bois Institute (21 April 2003).

Tom Stoppard

• The Stagecraft of Tom Stoppard offers biographical and bibliographical, as well as stage histories for some of his work.
• Professor Jay Clayton (Vanderbilt University) and his students have created a hyperlinked glossary of terms for Stoppard's Arcadia, keyed by scene and page number.
• Professor Robert L. Devaney (Boston University) offers "an animated description of some of the mathematical ideas lurking in the background of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia."
• A review of Stoppard's Arcadia published in Scientific American.

Jonathan Swift

• A brief biography, with a selected bibliography of Swift's work and criticism on Swift.
• Lee Jaffe's page, Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels, has a page of links to e-texts of Swift's work and other web resources on Swift.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• The Victorian Web has an extensive series of resources on Tennyson, including a brief biography and information on the illustrated editions of Tennyson's poems, such as In Memorium.

Derek Walcott

• The Derek Walcott Page offers biographical and bibliographical information.
• Reviews and RealAudio of Walcott in the NYT.
• Listen (or watch) Derek Walcott read from his work at Harvard's Du Bois Institute (14 April 2003).

Oscar Wilde

• The Victorian Web pages on Oscar Wilde offer a brief biography.
• The Official Web Site of Oscar Wilde offers a more detailed biography, as well as links to a wonderful page of photographs of Wilde.
• Another set of photographs is available from the archives of the Clark Library.
• Oscarina, a fascinating web project, traces Wilde's life and others' views of Wilde by using excerpts of primary documents, such as Wilde's letters to Lord Douglas, to his wife, the offending letters and visiting cards that precipitated his trials, excerpts from his trials, and letters after he was released from prison.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

• A brief biography of Wilmot offers some historical background about his life as well as links to some of his poems.

Mary Wollstonecraft

• A brief biography with some links is available through Spartacus.
• A timeline of Wollstonecraft's life.

Virginia Woolf

• Biographical information on Woolf
  • A biography of Woolf at Spartacus with hyperlinks.
  • A series of links with biographical information and pictures at BBC Knowledge.
  • The Guardian's Author Page for Virginia Woolf, with a brief biography and overview of her work, along with links to Guardian articles about her work.
  • A detailed chronology of Woolf's life at the Virginia Woolf Web. (Note: many links do not work, but the information in the chronology is accurate.)
  • The Knitting Circle's page on Woolf provides some biographical and annotated bibliographical information.
  • Read The New York Times obituary for Woolf.
• "Leslie Stephen's Photograph Album" provides a collection of photographs from the album of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), Woolf's father. The album, held in the Mortimer Rare Book Room of the Library at Smith College, offers a visual documentary of Woolf's extended family and her early life. Of special note:
  • an early photo of Woolf's mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson.
  • a photo of Julia holding Virginia.
  • a photo of a young Thoby Stephen.
  • a photo of a young Virginia and her brother Adrian playing cricket.
  • a photo of the four children at lessons.
  • a photo of Virginia reading with her mother and father.
• View several portraits of Virginia Woolf:
  • The famous (and most popular) portrait taken in 1902 by George Charles Beresford and housed at the National Portrait Gallery is available from their page of Woolf's portraits.
  • A collection of other portraits by Man Ray and Giselle Freund.
  • "Images of Virginia Woolf: An Electronic Gallery" also has a series of images.
• Hear Virginia Woolf's voice as she speaks a few words about English speech from a link available at this site.
• General resources and information on Woolf's work
  • The Virginia Woolf Web has been the most comprehensive of all the sites on Woolf, but its links aren't always current, and so it's now rather hit or miss. It has four parts: Life and Works of Virginia Woolf, VWWI Links 1 (Woolf Studies on the Web), VWW Links 2 (Places of Interest, Hotch-Potch, and Film), and VWW Links 3 (The Bloomsbury Group and Others), as well as other resources.
  • A wide-ranging series of links about Woolf's work through Literaryhistory.com, including links to New York Times reviews of her novels.
  • "Virginia Woolf: A Botanical Perspective" (Smith College) "explores the ubiquitous and powerful presence of plants and flowers in Virginia Woolf's life and work."
• Read Woolf's essay on film, "The Movies and Reality," first published in The New Republic on 4 August 1926.
• Web resources on particular works:
  • The Voyage Out:
    • Author Michael Cunningham's essay at Salon magazine (adapted from his introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Voyage Out) provides a thoughtful discussion of this first novel and Woolf's career.
  • "Thunder at Wembly":
    • Woolf's 1924 essay responded to the extremely popular British Empire Exhibition, which ran from 1924 to 1925. "Creating Wembley: The Construction of a National Monument" not only provides a history of Wembley Stadium (which began life as part of the Empire Exhibition), but also a detailed look at the Exhibition itelf.
    • Also view: some background and pictures of the Exhibition; a picture of the opening ceremony and commemorative stamps; an advertisement and picture of the grounds; souvenirs, with some further information about the exhibition.
  • To the Lighthouse:
    • Study questions by Cathy Decker.
    • A structural outline of To the Lighthouse by E. K. Sparks (Clemson University).
    • A reading of Woolf's narrative strategies in To the Lighthouse in light of the male and masculine modernism of Woolf's contemporaries. (Link courtesy of the Internet Archive.)
    • The fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife" which Mrs. Ramsay reads to James in Part I. (Another version of the tale is available as well.)
    • Poetry quoted during the novel includes Browne's "Siren's Song," Cowper's "The Castaway," Elton's "Luliana Lurilee," Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 98, and Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade." (A separate web page,"Allusions in Woolf's To the Lighthouse," should also provide the text to these poems.)
    • Context for Woolf's discussion of nature in Part II: Excerpts (LIV-LVI) from Tennyson's In Memorium.
    • Presentation on Woolf's holograph draft. (Note: Can only be viewed in Internet Explorer.)
    • Lily's painting may have been inspired by this photograph of Woolf's mother holding Vanessa, and this photograph of Julia at a window of Talland House, with Virginia and Adrian.
  • The Waves:
    • Some comments posted to the Virginia Woolf listserv about reading strategies for The Waves.
    • A detailed study guide to The Waves, featuring links to study questions, detailed character analyses, a FAQ, excerpts from contemporary reviews, and more.
  • Three Guineas:
    • Ellen Goodman's syndicated op-ed column, "Are women now insiders on the war?" (27 March 2003) looks at gender and the war with Iraq through the lens of Woolf's Three Guineas.

William Wordsworth

• The Wordsworth Page has links to a detailed biography of Wordsworth and to a collection of images of the poet at different periods of his life.
• Norton Topics Online: The Romantic Period provides some cultural context for Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," including information on British tourism in the late 18th century, excerpts from the popular travel writer Thomas Gilpin on the Wye valley and Tintern Abbey, and the landscape painter Claude Lorrain.
• Read about the Enclosure Acts in the 18th century, which transformed the countryside, and about the many styles of hedges used around England.

W.B. Yeats

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