Literature, Creative Writing, & Literary Criticism: Websites
This guide will help you find British, American, and English-language literary texts, creative writing resources, and literary criticism on authors or literary works in books, reference book entries, and journal articles available from the OSU Library.
Criticism in Websites
Although there is not much scholarly criticism available on the free World Wide Web, there are many sites that point to helpful resources in the study literature. This is but a selected listing of sites that may be of use to students and researchers.
This page also lists sites with free, public domain e-books that would be of interest to those studying literature. The OSU Library also provides several specialized library databases with thousands of digitized books and publications from earlier periods--see Historical E-Books Collections at the OSU Library.
General Web Sites for Literature & Creative Writing
Below are some general Web resources for literature and creative writing:
- Inter-Play is an online index to plays in collections, anthologies, and periodicals
- Big List of Literary Magazines is an up-to-date directory of literary magazines with information on scope and content and contact links.
- Poetry Archives is the largest non-profit organization for creative writers.
- Poets & Writers is the largest non-profit organization for creative writers.
- Poets.org is the official site of the American Academy of Poets offering essays, interviews, biographies, almost 2,000 poems, and audio clips of readings.
- Writer's Digest is a resource site for authors with information on writing, publishing, and related topics.
- Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Directory Directory listing of literary magazines and book publishers for creative writing. Includes acceptance rates, print runs, award winners, and other information.
General Web Resources for Literary Criticism
Below are some general Web sites or portals with information on literary studies.
- Modern Language Association (MLA) is the premier organization for the study of languages, literature, folklore, and cultural studies. Their Web site includes resources for literary study as well as information on MLA publications and MLA Style for writers.
- Voice of the Shuttle (VoS) is a structured, briefly annotated guide to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet that both respect the established humanistic disciplines and point to their transformation as they interact with the science, social sciences, and with new digital media.
- Calls for Papers (UPenn) is a listing of calls for conference paper proposals and papers for journals and book collections in English literary studies and the humanities (including Popular Culture Studies, Gender Studies, and other related fields). It is maintained by the University of Pennsylvania English Department.
Public Domain E-Book Collections on the Web
These resources provide free, online e-book versions of public domain works of literature. These digital collections are excellent sources of primary texts for literary study, and for the study of literary history and literature and culture. For additional primary work collections, both library databases and free sites, see the Historical E-Book/Digital Collections research guide.
- American Verse Project is an electronic poetry archive of verse published before 1920.
- Project Gutenberg is another pioneering site in free, public domain e-books, now offering over 100,00 e-books through their partners, and 33,000 titles that can be downloaded to e-readers such as Kindle, iPad, Sony eReader, and others.
- Google Books Search and preview millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide using Google Book Search.
