Paul P.Reuben's Perspectives in American Literature Pages. This major site includes extensive bibliographies of American authors as well as study questions about their major works.history; its SiteScene reviews are extensive and thorough.
Literary Resources on the Net. Jack Lynch maintains this excellent site at Rutgers; the entries are current, searchable, and annotated.
American Studies Web at Georgetown University. Sponsored by the American Studies Association, this site features web syllabi in American literature and American studies from 1994-1999. The Encyclopedia of American Studies, also at the site, is not accessible to non-ASA members.
American Studies Links. Richard Horwitz, Professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa, has compiled this very useful cross-disciplinary list of recommended links in an easy-to-use tabbed format.
Early American
The Society of Early Americanists Home Page includes information about the Society as well as a syllabus archive, bibliographies, teaching resources, and a host of useful links, including several to repositories of primary documents.
Early Americas Digital Archive at the University of Maryland is searchable and includes "electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820."
Common-Place is an online journal sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society; it features excellent articles on American history and culture.
Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color. This site includes biographical information and bibliographies on contemporary writers, but some nineteenth-century subjects are covered as well.
Early American Women Writers, a new site edited by Sharon Harris, contains headnotes, information, and scholarly biographies.
The Poetess Archive at Miami University includes works by men and women from 1785-1900.
Older Sites
Project Crow. This site by Michael O'Conner, Millikin University (of American Literature Online, a site no longer available) contains links to and reviews of American literature sites. (from 2003).
Outline of American Literature. A publication of the U.S. Department of State, this online book by Kathryn VanSpanckeren provides descriptions of periods in American literature.(from 1998)
American Authors on the Web. Mitsuharu Matsuoka (Manchester University) has arranged American authors by date of birth
General Literature Sites
Victorian Web. George Landow, one of the foremost authorities on literary hypertext, created this rich site. See also the many links at the Victoria Research Web,a site associated with the VICTORIA discussion list.
The NINES Project is a peer-reviewed site that uses special software (Collex) to enhance the usability of current literary digitization projects on the web. It also sponsors annual workshops on creating these projects (Application deadline: October 15.)
Voice of the Shuttle. One of the first such sites on the Web, Alan Liu's comprehensive site covers literary theory as well as various periods of literature. The appearance of the site has recently been updated, and a search feature has been added.
Modern American Poetry. This companion site to Anthology of Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson, includes biographies, links, and excerpts from literary criticism on the poets.
Museum of American Poetics. This site focuses primarily on modern poetry and includes links to poetry sites as well as RealVideo presentations by and about contemporary authors.
$ FindArticles.com provides free access to a limited selection of peer-reviewed journals. Other articles are available for a fee. This is the principal site for those without access to Project Muse and other university-based subscription services.
Literary History. This easy-to-navigate site maintains a collection of annotated links on 19th-century British and 20th century British and American writers.
$ Literary Encyclopedia. This resource provides the first 600 words of an article for free; users must pay to see the rest. It includes biographical essays written by literature scholars; it also has a feature that permits visitors to create a timeline.
Books Online
Note: Because of copyright restrictions, only works published prior to 1923 and those made available by the copyright holder are available for free online. Before you pay to read something published before 1923, such as the e-books available at Amazon.com, alibris.com and other sites, check these sites for links to the free versions of the texts. In most cases, the only pre-1923 books offered for sale are those also offered without charge by Project Gutenberg or other sites.
Google Books. This site has full versions in .pdf format of a lot of out-of-copyright books; it's a great resource. To find the complete version and not the snippet version, use Advanced Search. Note: for-profit print-on-demand publishers have locked up some of these these out-of-copyright books so that Google can't provide a full view. If you can't find them at Google Books, try archive.org or Project Gutenberg.
Archive.org. This site has books as well as sound and film media, including some that are not available at Google Books.
A Celebration of Women Writers. Mary Mark Ockerbloom's comprehensive site includes links to texts, pictures, and bibliographies for American women writers as well as authors from many other countries.
Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg has been putting texts online in plain text or zipped form for several years. The site includes a searchable index. The Project Gutenberg site now also has an RSS feed (for Bloglines or other rss feed readers) so that you can see what texts have been added.
Project Bartleby Archive. This searchable archive of online texts at Columbia University includes reference books on American literature.
The Open Library project reproduces the page images of the edition and allows viewers to "turn the pages" just as they would with a regular book. Among the books included are some by Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Fenimore Cooper, and Gertrude Atherton.
Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875.This searchable site features works 1752 texts by 842 authors; its object is to include every novel published from 1851-1875 in the United States. Some familiar works are included, but many are rare or otherwise unobtainable online.
Perseus Project. Although this site's principal focus is ancient and Renaissance literature, the Perseus Project at Tufts University has a significant collection of California and Midwestern online texts.
Modernist Journals Project at Brown University includes .pdf image files of The New Age(1907-1922) and Cine-Tracts (1977-1982). New to the collection: December 1910.
MemoWare PDA Document Repository. This site has many classic works by Twain, Howells, Wharton, Crane, Melville, Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, and a host of other authors available as free downloads for those who use various types of handheld computers (PalmPilots and so forth).
Archive.org includes audiobooks and other media types.
Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Primary Sources
Cornell University's Making of America site is an extensive, searchable collection of major periodicals of the nineteenth century. The full collection lists 114 books and 24 periodicals, including Harper's, The Atlantic, Scribner's, and many other important journals. Files are now available in several formats: page images, .pdf (Adobe Acrobat), and uncorrected plain text.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (beta). This new site from the Library of Congress provides a searchable database of page images from selected American newspapers from 1900-1910 and information about other newspapers not online.
The New York Public Library, which has the Schomburg Collection of nineteenth-century African American women writers, has just made a number of other digital collections of images available online; it is especially rich in text and images about New York, maps, the performing arts, and African American history.
The FictionMags index provides tables of contents for popular periodicals of the twentieth century such as The Saturday Evening Post; it is cross-indexed by author and periodical. Although it focuses on genre fiction (science fiction and mysteries, primarily), it provides useful information on other types as well.
The Women Working, 1870-1930 archive (Open Collections Program) at Harvard University includes "[d]igitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections that explore women's roles in the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression." The site provides free, searchable access to the collection's "2,396 books and pamphlets, 1,075 photographs, and 5,000 pages from manuscript collections."
Godey's Lady's Book. Selected issues of an important nineteenth-century periodical; includes illustrations. Note: $ Accessible Archives has the full run of this periodical, but it costs $60 a year for individual subscribers.
Internet Library of Early Journals.This site at Oxford includes a search feature and online versions of important British periodicals including Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
The Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland contains online versions of primary sources such as proclamations, letters from slaves, court testimony, and other documents from the National Archives as well as essays on the period 1861-1867.
$ HarpWeek. Although most of this collection of Harper's Weekly magazines is not available to anyone but institutional subscribers, it does contain a few free sites, including the following: Immigrant and Ethnic America, The American West, Black America: 1857-1874, The World of Thomas Nast, and American Political Prints.
The Library of America is a nonprofit organization devoted to publishing authoritative editions of American authors. Its site includes information not only about its products but also about the authors whose works it publishes.
National Endowment for the Humanities. This site provides links to and information about what the NEH considers to be the best literature sites on the web for K-12 educators and students, including American literature sites.
The Scout Report.A well-respected weekly online publication from the University of Wisconsin, the Scout Report selects and reviews sites of interest to researchers.
Infomine. Developed by librarians at the University of California at Riverside and other academic libraries, this useful site includes "expert-selected and described links" in a variety of disciplines.
History Matters. Primarily designed for teachers of U. S. history, this site at George Mason University also reviews links to many sites dealing with American cultural history and has a search feature.