Alexander Street Literature
(formerly World Literature Online)

Alexander Street Literature brings together the hundreds of thousands of pages of poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, plays, and essays of Alexander Street’s 14 individual literature collections and makes them accessible and cross-searchable in a single, specially priced package. Rich in sociological and historical significance, this collection of more than 250,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, and novels and 5,000 full-text plays and film scripts celebrates the literatures of place, gender, and race. With new content being added on a regular basis, the current package will grow to more than 600,000 pages of poetry and prose plus 6,200 dramatic works. Students and scholars of literature, history, politics, transatlantic studies, postcolonial studies, geography, cultural studies, and anthropology can now explore these important works in new ways with the Alexander Street Literature unified search interface.

Vast and continuously growing, Alexander Street Literature celebrates the creative achievements of authors from around the globe, including the broad literary output of Africa and its diaspora, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and other regions—along with the North American expressions of this rich world heritage.

EDITORIAL STANDARDS

Alexander Street Literature includes all of the content from each of 14 Alexander Street literature and drama collections. For one annual subscription price, deeply discounted, your library has access to hundreds of thousands of pages.

Alexander Street Literature brings your faculty and students:

• The definitive electronic space for the study of a specific literary area.

• Online collected editions of authors—including early, rare, hard to access, or previously unpublished works. In most instances, these are the only collected editions available in any format.

• Access to important writers who have remained largely unstudied because only selected works have been published in the occasional anthology.

• The rigorous, Semantic Indexing™ and uniquely powerful search capabilities Alexander Street’s online collections are known for—allowing users to make new discoveries—comparing genres, authors, themes, cultures, and more—in ways never before possible.

More than 75% of the works within Alexander Street Literature are otherwise inaccessible, previously unpublished, or in-copyright and therefore not free on the Web. Under the guidance of some of the world’s leading faculty advisors, who help to select the content and write introductory and contextual commentaries, these collections meet the strictest scholarly standards.

DEFINITIVE DIGITAL EDITIONS AND MORE

Access to rare and previously unpublished material is only the beginning of the value in Alexander Street Literature. Each text is re-keyed to 99.95% accuracy to ensure that searching is thorough and precise. Exceptionally detailed indexing—to the level of each poem, scene, and work—allows users to explore and analyze the content in ways that are simply impossible in paper form. For example:

• Find 100 scenes on the topic of funerals within 1,200 plays written by African Americans.

• Analyze how the occurrence of the words spider or Anansi have evolved over time within the tropes in Caribbean myth.

• Compare how poems from Chilean authors and those from Cuban writers address politics or political as subject.

• Examine how Derek Walcott treats themes of loneliness across his plays and fiction.

There is also rich, supplementary material to inform the texts. For example, American Indian Drama includes a full run of the Native American Playwrights Newsletter, a publication vital to scholarship that exists in only a handful of libraries. In Latino Literature are previously unpublished, live audio recordings of early Chicano theatre companies such as Teatro Espíritu de Aztlán and Teatro Mestizo. Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period includes essays by leading academics explaining the significance of the materials.

WHAT’S IN THIS SERIES TODAY?

Subscribers to Alexander Street Literature have access to the following collections:

• American Film Scripts

• Asian American Drama

• Black Drama

• Black Short Fiction and Folklore

• Black Women Writers

• Caribbean Literature

• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period

• Latin American Women Writers

• Latino Literature

• North American Indian Drama

• North American Women's Drama

• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period

• South and Southeast Asian Literature in English

• Twentieth Century North American Drama

Today, there are approximately 300,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, and novels, along with 5,000 plays and film scripts in full text. As the 14 collections continue to grow, Alexander Street Literature will reach nearly 660,000 pages of poetry and prose plus more than 6,200 plays and scripts.

SUBSCRIPTION AND PURCHASE OPTIONS

Alexander Street Literature is available by annual subscription, with prices scaled to library budget. If your institution has already purchased perpetual rights to some of the individual collections that make up Alexander Street Literature, the subscription price to Alexander Street Literature is reduced proportionately. A library that owns all of the individual collections pays just the minimum annual fee.

You may also make a one-time purchase of perpetual rights. If you would like to purchase individual collections, we offer special rates—with our largest discounts to libraries that purchase all of the collections. Please contact us for details.

Alexander Street Literature is available today as a discounted package of all fourteen of our literature collections. All content is cross-searchable through a new, unified search tool.
For free trail and pricing information, contact us at sales@alexanderstreet.com.