Literature

Alexander Street Literature brings together the hundreds of thousands of pages of poetry, short stories, novels, and non-fiction in 8 Alexander Street individual literature collections, cross-searchable through a new interface.

Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection delivers, for the first time online, more than 300 important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation’s premiere radio theatre company. The plays—which include some of the most significant dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening.

Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 50,000 pages and an estimated 8,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present.

Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African Diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, black women needed to create their own identities and movements.

The literature of the Caribbean is exceptional, both in language and subject. More than a million and a half Africans, along with many Indians and South Asians, were brought to the Caribbean between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This collection comprises more than eighty volumes of poetry by Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842, a significant, but largely underappreciated body of work.  Most of the texts are rare, existing in print in fewer than five libraries in the world. Along with the poetic texts are biographical and critical essays contributed by the world’s foremost poetry scholars and other supporting resources.

Discover more than 200 novels, many hundreds of short stories, 20,000 pages of poetry, and more than 400 plays. The majority of the works are in English, with selected works of particular importance in Spanish. The collection begins with the works of Chicano writers in the Southwest in the early 19th century and follows through to include contemporary works. Scholars in social history, literature, and Latino studies will find value in Latino Literature.

North American Theatre Online will be the largest, most comprehensive reference work in North American drama. It will provide detailed bibliographic information on more than 10,000 plays – including references to works that have never been published. It will contain thousands of facts about theaters, authors, theatrical companies, and individuals, as well as some 1,000 playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera. Part of the Alexander Street Drama package.

Our flagship collection, North American Women's Letters and Diares, is a massive project, cataloging and indexing American and Canadian women's diaries and correspondence over centuries. Researchers will have access to 150,000 pages of materials, including more than 5,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts as facsimile images. Drawn from more than 1,000 sources and representing 1,500 women from all walks of life, the writings are extensively indexed. Databases of women, sources, personal events, historical events, a geographical table, and other features make the writings useful to researchers in history, sociology, literature, genealogy, women’s studies, and related fields. Part of the Letters and Diaries Online package.

"Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period is recommended for larger libraries, both academic and public, supporting humanities research, and is another example of the positive collaborative efforts between librarians, scholars, and Alexander Street Press. Although the content may not have the broad appeal of some of the other ASP products, the quality of the data and the access it provides to this niche of English literature is invaluable."
 

 -- Helene Williams, Collection Development, Widener Library, Harvard University (Library Journal, 7/18/02)
 

Theatre in Video contains more than 250 of the world’s most important plays, together with more than 100 video documentaries, online in streaming video—more than 500 hours in all*.

From Maxwell Anderson to Marsha Norman, the complete works of major North American playwrights. Alongside the works of the most successful writers of the century are the lesser-known but important works of African Americans, Asian Americans, gay and lesbian writers, and others. Hundreds of unpublished plays, production information, playbills, and theatre details round out the collection.