This guide has been designed as a starting point for research involving the nineteenth century literature.

If you need help, please contact Ivana Niseteo, Liaison Librarian for English, French, French Programs (FASS), Global Humanities, Linguistics, and World Languages & Literatures at 778.782.6838 or iniseteo@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

Reference sources

• 19^th century American literature [print]
• Romanticism in the shadow of war: literary culture in the Napoleonic War years [print]
• Oxford Reference Online. Online versions of 100 general reference works plus material in language, science and medicine, humanities and social sciences, business, and professional areas.
• Encyclopedia Britannica. An all-purpose online encyclopedia, including an online atlas, dictionary, and select journal articles.

Encyclopedias and companions

• A new companion to Victorian literature and culture [print or online]
• Critical companion to Mary Shelley: a literary reference to her life and work [print]
• Cambridge companion to Charles Dickens [print or online]
• Cambridge companion to Keats [print or online]
• Oscar Wilde in context [print]
• Literary Encyclopedia. Provides authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics.

Dictionaries and literary terms

• Meaning in the history of English : words and texts in content
• A companion to the history of the English language [print]
• The story of English in 100 words [print]
• Oxford English Dictionary. Covers words from across the English speaking world. It also gives etymological analysis, variant spellings, and pronunciation using IPA.
• Dictionary of Old English: A to I. Contains some 1319 headwords, as well as revised versions of the seven previously published versions.
• The Oxford dictionary of literary terms.
• Concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms [print or online].
• The Penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary theory [print].
• The Bedford glossary of critical and literary terms [print].
• A glossary of contemporary literary theory [print]

Biographical information

• Biographical dictionary of literary influences: the nineteenth century, 1800-1914 [print]

Literary criticism      

• Fairy tales, natural history and Victorian culture
• MLA International Bibliography. Contains scholarly articles on English literature, linguistics, language and folklore.
• Literature Online. Contains works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.
• Oxford Bibliographies Online. Online index to bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation with a bibliographical essay on sources.
• Literature Criticism Online. Full text access to six major Gale literary criticism series, covering literature from 1400 to the present.
• Project MUSE Search. Full text access to the back files of Humanities and Social Science Journals; Good English Literature content.
• JSTOR. Full text access to the back files of Humanities and Social Science Journals; Good English Literature content. Note the most recent 2-5 years are excluded.

Primary sources

• Gale NewsVault. Allows you to search several historical newspaper and periodical databases at one time.  19th century databases include: 19th Century British Library Newspapers, 19th Century UK Periodicals, Times (of London) Digital Archive 1785-1985.
• BritishPeriodicals. British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and beyond.
• American Periodical Series (APS Online). The more than 1,000 periodicals provide the materials necessary to study trends in the United States from 1741-1900.
• 19th Century U.S. Newspaper Digital Archive. Provides access to approximately 1.7 million pages of primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other documents from the 19th century. 
• Historical Newspapers. Full page and article images of historical newspapers including:
  • The New York Times (1851 to 4 years ago)
  • The Wall Street Journal (1889 to 18 years ago)
  • The Washington Post (1877 to 7 years ago)
• Globe & Mail Canada's Heritage from 1844. Includes major events in Canadian history, plus thousands of images, advertisements, and political cartoons dating back to the pre-confederation era.
• British Colonist. This website contains all the issues of the British Colonist (also called The Daily British Colonist, the Daily Colonist, and other variants) from its first issue in 1858 to December 1920 (Victoria, BC).
• ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers - Newspaper Digitization Projects. ICON gathers and provides data on physical and digital collections of newspapers from around the world.
• Google News Archive. An extension of Google News that provides access to scanned archives of newspapers.

For additional primary sources, take a look at SFU Library’s Primary Sources guide.

Images & film

SFU Library has a comprehensive guide for finding images within SFU subscribed databases and online, including how to properly cite images in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats.

Related topics

Theatre

• Acting naturally: Victoria theatricality and authenticity [print]
• Staging romantic chameleons and imposters
• Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP). Contains early modern plays and playwrights with additional information such as genre, dates of first publication and production.
• Records of Early English Drama (REED): Patrons and Performances. Designed to include a wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom.

History     

• America: History and Life. Indexes literature on all aspects of U.S. and Canadian history, culture and current affairs.
• Bibliography of British & Irish History. An authoritative guide to what has been written from the Roman period to the present day.
• Historical Abstracts. Indexes journal articles, book reviews, dissertations on the history of the world outside of Canada & the United States.
• British History Online. Contains some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.

Religion

• The Bible in English. A collection of 20 different versions of the English Bible from the tenth to the twentieth century, including 12 full Bibles, 5 New Testament texts, 2 versions of the Gospels only, and William Tyndale's translations of the Pentateuch, Jonah and the New Testament.
• ATLA Religion Database. Indexes journal articles on all aspects of religion and theology, including church and religious history.

Additional sources

• Project Gutenberg. Provides access to over 33,000 downloadable e-books.
• Oxford Text Archive. Develops, collects, catalogues and preserves electronic literary and linguistic resources for use in research, teaching and learning.
• Representative Poetry Online. Includes English poems by 500 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today.
• Centre for Early Modern Studies. From Oxford University, a central forum for research, conferences, and graduate study.