Guides: Literature in English: Resources: 20th-Century Literature

20th-Century Literature

Individual Journals

Does a journal seem to be missing? Check the Top Journals in Literature section on the guide homepage.

Periodical Indexes and Bibliographic Databases

20th Century American Poetry
This collection of full-text poems includes 52,000 drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Andrei Codrescu, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Cathy Song.
British Periodicals
British Periodicals tracks 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 into the 20th century. On completion this digital archive will consist of more than 460 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.
Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
Provides information about children's books, video and audio recordings, film strips, and other child-focused media. Entries include summary publication information, annotations, reading measurement program levels, reviews, and full MARC cataloging information. For the children's books, CLCD provides full-text reviews from independent review sources; review sources are listed in the Database Review. Search by author, title, subject, or keyword. Limit by category (ficture or non-fiction), qualifier (age, language, author/illustrator, publisher, or date), or genre.
Independent voices : an open access collection of an Alternative Press
A four-year project to digitize over 1 million pages from the magazines, journals, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection will grow to include small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and the extreme right-wing press.
Proquest Historical Newspapers
Multi-database search interface that allows for simultaneous searching of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Defender, Pittsbugh Courier and Wall Street Journal
Short Story Index
Detailed indexing for hundreds of thousands of short stories.

Other Databases

Does a database seem to be missing? Check the Core Databases section on the guide homepage.

20th Century English Poetry
A collection of 594 volumes of poetry by 282 poets from 1900-2000, including W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library.
Black Drama: 1850 to present, second edition
Contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 600 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.

Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition
Gathers for the first time in one place the collected, uncollected, and unpublished prose of one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. The fully searchable, integrative edition includes all of Eliot's collected essays, reviews, lectures, commentaries from The Criterion, and letters to editors, including more than 700 uncollected and 150 unpublished pieces from 1905 to 1965. Other highlights include essays from his student years at Smith Academy and Harvard and his graduate work at Harvard and Oxford, including his doctoral dissertation; unsigned, unidentified essays published in the New Statesman and the Monist; essays and reviews published in the Egoist, Athenaeum, TLS, Dial, Art and Letters; his Clark and Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry, Norton Lectures, Page-Barbour Lectures, Boutwood Lectures; unpublished essays, lectures, addresses from various archives; and transcripts of broadcasts, speeches, endorsements, and memorial tributes.

Faber Poetry Library
A searchable, full-text collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.
Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive
Listen in on William Faulkners sessions with audiences at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, during his two terms as UVAs first Writer-in-Residence. The audio files are accompanied by transcripts. The entire database is searchable.
First World War
Presents rich and varied primary source documents on the personal experiences of men and women, recruitment, and the development and dissemination of various forms of propaganda. Original documents include: personal narratives, diaries, newspapers, posters, postcards, photographs, printed books, military and government files, and ephemera.
First World War Poetry Digital Archive
An online repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research, based at Oxford.
John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
This collection offers unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th-centuries. Categories include 19th-century entertainment, the booktrade, popular prints, crimes, murders and executions, and advertising.
Literature, Culture and Society in Depression Era America: Archives of the Federal Writers' Project
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was the most controversial and contentious program of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal." This bold, imaginative and wide-ranging enterprise is integral to understanding literature, culture and society in America during the Depression era.

NAACP Papers
-Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files
-The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces, Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses.
-Legal Department Files
-Special Subjects
-Branch Files

North American Indian Drama
Full text of plays by American Indian, First Nation, and Pacific Islanders playwrights of the 20th century; information about the plays and their production, and biographical data.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950
Fulltext of letters and diaries, published and manuscript, of American women during the Colonial period through 1950. Biographical information is provided for each writer. Primary source materials are searchable by document type and subject, relevant historical events, and author-specific information including author name, date, age, marital status, maternal status, and geographical location when writing, age at marriage and at first childbirth, number of marriages and of children, nationality and race, religion, occupation, and relevant personal events.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
"Orlando provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. "
Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement
The collection consists of materials from the years 1913 through 1998 that document African American author and activist Amiri Baraka and were gathered by Dr. Komozi Woodard in the course of his research. The extensive documentation includes poetry, organizational records, print publications, articles, plays, speeches, personal correspondence, oral histories, as well as some personal records. The materials cover Baraka's involvement in the politics in Newark, N.J. and in Black Power movement organizations such as the Congress of African People, the National Black Conference movement, the Black Women's United Front. Later materials document Baraka's increasing involvement in Marxism.
Women, War & Society, 1914-1918
Fully searchable primary source materials brought together in the Imperial War Museum, London. Document types include charity and international relief reports, pamphlets, photographs, press cuttings, magazines, posters, correspondence, minutes, records, diaries, memoranda, statistics, circulars, regulations and invitations.

Encyclopedias and Reference Works

Cambridge Companions related to 20th-Century Literature
Children's Literature Review
Each of the more than 150 volumes in this long-standing series profiles approximately three to eight authors of children’s or young adult literature of all genres and provides selected full-text or excerpted criticism reproduced from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers and scholarly journals.
Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry
Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry

Special Collections

Banned Book Collection
Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness
Over 6,000 works of fiction—novels, short stories, poetry and song donated by Penn alumna Caroline Schimmel, CW’67.
Comics Collection
Erwin K. and Carol Welsch T.S. Eliot Collection
Ezra Pound Research Collection
Joanna Banks Collection
Over 10,000 books, periodicals, recordings, and photographs by and about African Americans. The collection has particular concentrations in children's literature, cooking, and African American women.
Mark B. Adams Science Fiction Collection
R. Norris Williams World War I Collection
Running Press Book Publishing Company Archives
The archive of this Philadelphia-based publishing company includes the complete catalog of Running Press publications from 1972, when it began, to the present. The collection is housed in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Theodore Dreiser Papers
William Carlos Williams Research Collection
World War I Pamphlet Collection
Zinman Atomic Energy Collection