Lives of Literature on JSTOR

Supporting the study of key figures and texts from the 19th century, the Lives of Literature resource includes 29 journals dedicated to Victorian, Edwardian & Gothic authors. These journals focus on a single author or text as an entry point to covering that writer and their sphere or era. This content fulfills a need within the scholarly community for in-depth study about an individual author, while also supporting advanced literary studies on an entire age by adding diverse coverage of a broad range of authors and of interpretive approaches. Touching on interdisciplinary fields including British Studies, Feminist & Women’s Studies, and History, authors covered within this cluster of journals include Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Mervyn Peake, and Charles Nodier.

Try searching for references to non-canonical authors who published in the popular press or for artists and critics who had close affiliations with Victorian literary movements.

Dickens Studies Annual also covers writers of genre fiction such as Wilkie Collins, as well as a number of studies of 19th-century women’s writing, encompassing both canonical and lesser-known women authors. And in Carlyle Studies Annual you will find research linking the Carlyles to Karl Marx, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, and the modernist architect Walter Gropius.

Searching this module can lead researchers to a number of exciting interdisciplinary connections!

Primary

Victorian Women Writers Project
Focuses on British women writers, but currently expanding to include 19^th-century English-language women’s writing more generally. Contains poetry, prose, children’s literature, pamphlets, and more.

Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive of Ackermann’s 19^th-Century Literary Annual
Hyperlinked version of 8 years of an early Victorian literary annual. Includes a number of poems and prose pieces by women authors whose writing is being resurfaced through feminist recovery work.

Gothic Archive
A “growing digital collection of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Gothic chapbooks” hosted online by Marquette University. Includes summaries of chapbooks and contextual materials.

Rossetti Hypermedia Archive
Exhaustive digital project compiling the visual art, writing, and correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Also includes valuable contextual primary source materials of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Dickens Journals Online
Complete online edition of magazines edited by Charles Dickens. Useful for Dickens scholars and those interested in the Victorian popular press. Indexed, searchable, and linked to contextual scholarship.

Reference

Victorian Research Web
Comprehensive guide to Victorian research resources by Patrick Leary. Includes online reference texts and bibliographies as well as guides to archives, library holdings, journals, and Victorian studies groups.

Victorian Studies Bibliography
Online version of a bibliography listing publications concerning the Victorian period and Victorian studies, published by Victorian Studies since 1933. Needs to be updated, but still incredibly valuable.

Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online
Not only Victorian scholarship, but still useful to Victorian scholars. A peer-reviewed digital compendium of nineteenth-century resources, including secondary sources and contextualized primary sources.

Victorian Web
Brief introduction to Victorian studies by Dr. George P. Landow. Covers literary studies as well as related disciplines, and links to useful primary, secondary, and reference materials, including visual materials.

Gothic Novel and Horror Fiction Links
Links collected by Dr. Katherine D. Harris covering a wide range of secondary sources and reference resources for Gothic literature. Has a particularly good collection of links to visual resources.

 

Just for fun, we've created some coloring pages from copyright-free images in Artstor. Click on the small images below to get larger versions for printing. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Bedford, Francis. Ilfracombe, The Victorian Promenade. 1870s. Photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cassatt, Mary. The Letter. 1890-91. Print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manet, Edouard. The Urchin. 19^th century. Facsimile reproduction of etching. Published by J.B. Neumann. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pyle, Howard. The Princess and the Pigeons, from The Wonder Clock. 1886-88. Drawing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whistler, James McNeill. Old Hungerford Bridge. 1861. Print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.