Resources

LINKS TO ONLINE RESOURCES

In literature, "There is no clock!"
Peer Review and Use of Secondary Sources: Are you confused by the idea of a "peer-reviewed journal" or press? If you want to be an English major, or just an intelligent researcher in this era of "information" masquerading as knowledge, you must understand how this process has been used to construct specialized scholarly knowledge.
How Do Scholars Use Secondary Sources?: Once you understand what a peer-reviewed scholarly publication means, you should think about how scholars use other scholars' publications in their own published work. Those are the practices we want you to follow in your own papers for the English Major.
Library Research Techniques of the Professional Scholar: three valuable techniques for getting the best sources for literary research writing--I strongly recommend that you read this short web page.
Reading to Write About Medieval Literature: how to get the most out of what you read, and what to do when your reading is baffling you--I strongly recommend that you read this web page if you are reading anything before 1600.
Goucher College Writing Center Schedule: see the tutors at least twice while working on your midterm of final papers, first to brainstorm the focus of the paper, and again to reorganize and polish the revision. A third visit can help polish your style and may catch silly errors your mind has been too busy to spot.
In Defense of Hidden Meanings and Interpretation--Theory 101: who says there are hidden meanings in texts? Aren't our first readings the most reliable? Do you mean to tell me authors put things into texts which aren't meant for the casual reader to find? Are you really telling me that authors can't always control what their texts will reveal? C'mon!
Poetic Personae and Literary "Truth": Americans tend to wear masks only on Halloween, and they have little conscious knowledge of what they're doing when they put those "vizers" on. The poet's "persona," from the Greek word for the dramatic actor's mask, is one of the most important creations in all literature. The synthetic projection of other personae within the work extends the notion of personae (plural) until they populate works with all the "people" which we take for granted, and by which authors manipulate us. Though based on Elizabethan lyric, this short discussion has real "legs."
Critical Methods and Literary Terms: how do we analyze literature in the English major, and what terms do we use? This is a short introduction to a big subject, intended for incoming majors who have not yet taken English 215, and for non-majors trying to figure out how to read like a professional.
In-Class Performance and Interpretation Hints: Students in English 211, 240, 330 and other Goucher English courses frequently are asked to perform the literature and to interpret the passage they have performed. How should this be done, and how can it be done excellently? Here's an introduction. It also will improve your experience in other courses where "performance" isn't formally taught or required, but rather it's expected that you'll do it in the course of study. Some literary scholars also typically refer to any act of reading and/or interpretation as a "performance."
Terms for Describing Poetic "Feet": English literature before the twentieth century paid attention to the rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables within the lines. Like a sentence, which can be parsed or subdivided into noun phrases and verb phrases, the poetic line can be parsed into "feet" based on how the unstressed and stressed syllables cluster together in ordinary pronunciation. These "feet" within a line have names which were given them by classical Greek poets, and they still are called by those names today. Describing the feet in a poetic line is the first stage in a scholarly description of a poem's "prosody" or metrical structure. Prosody is to poetic analysis what anatomy is to medicine.
Terms for Describing Poetic Meter: The numbers of feet in a poetic line are described in Latin terms which complete the scholar's description of a poem's prosody.
A Pre-Turn-In Paper Checklist: to help you spot those omissions and errors that cost needless points.
UBUWEB Visual, Concrete and Sound Poetry: This collection of images and sound files provides materials for the study of poetic representation using unusual combinations of sound, creative page layout, or images and text. It includes RealAudio files of many contemporary poets reading, and might provide useful ways to reconsider reading as a "performance" of the work. Most sources are Twentieth Century works, but the Early Visual Poetry, 1506-1726 link will give you several examples relevant to English 211, including images of George Herbert's "Easter Wings" in manuscript and first edition.
On-line Aids to the Study of Literary Theory and Critical Methods: the study of Modern and Post-Modern theory has extensive support on the Internet. There also are some useful sources for classical rhetoric.
Online Guide to Libraries and Archives: created by Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa and Jennifer Heise for students of medieval and renaissance culture, this overview provides an excellent introduction to the way information is stored and retrieved libraries large and small. If you are interested in studying library science, start here.
How do I read Literature and Why?: this autobiographical meditation grew out of an English 222 public folder exchange (Fall 2000) about gendered reading and Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." It's as good an introduction to my background as a reader/writer and student/teacher as anything I've written so far.
Do "assigned work" for free/thee?: authority, control, and assignments: this is a sequel to the "How do I read Literature and Why?" essay, and was also produced in response to two students' public folder postings in English 222 (Fall 2000). It's the "writing" component that corresponds to "How"'s description of the development of the "reader" in me.
Literary Theory and Interpretive Strategies: this is a series of short descriptions of recent schools of literary theory, illustrated with samples of what can be done with them. It's no substitute for English 215 and a good background in philosophy, but it's a start. It's also still under construction, but the module on Aristotle's "Poetics" is especially worth a look if you have just come to the English major and don't know where we got our basic terms for analyzing narrative and drama. It's the only intact "example" for the first section, Early Formalism, Prescriptive and Rhetorical Criticism.
Manuscript Tradition and the Printed Book: some early notes on the way literature was preserved and distributed before moveable type printing was introduced (c. 1450-1500), and on the enormous changes in books and book-reading cultures after that change.
Brown University Women Writers Project: (Goucher College users only--subscription account.) This site offers scholarly editions of previously unpublished works by women who wrote during the Renaissance, Restoration, and 18th century. You can find additional works by early women writers at the Emory Women Writers Resource Project at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center. The Brown site has an exceptionally large text base of edited Renaissance women writers, and the Emory site's strength is its unedited (as in previously unpublished) texts.
Interpreting Ancient Manuscripts: Timothy W. Seid's undergraduate, online course will teach you to understand how manuscripts were made and how scholars interpret them. Though his sample texts are from the Christian New Testament, the methods would apply to manuscripts of secular works, and to book production even into the modern era. Anyone interested in working with authors' original manuscripts as evidence of their creative processes should take a stroll through this site.
The Middle English Dictionary--the pre-eminent source of year-specific definitions of Middle English words is now available for free from the University of Michigan. Don't bother with the OED when reading Middle English. This is a far more complete set of definitions with far more Medieval examples because of the dictionary's focus.
Goucher College Library Catalog--Advanced Search
OTHER AREA LIBRARY ON-LINE CATALOGUES
University of Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue: a research tool especially good for searching collections of early books and manuscripts, especially strong in collections located in Germany and the rest of Eastern and Western Europe. Includes searches of the European branches of ABEBooks.
The English Short Title Catalog: a specialized online catalog recording information on books printed in the U.K. between 1450 and 1800, covering about 460,000 individual volumes. This catalog will tell you the publication history of all printed editions of assignments for English 211, English 240, and English 330. Manuscript versions of the earliest Old and Middle English literature have to be searched separately.
Bodleian Library (Oxford University): main site; MS images selection. Based on the collection of Duke Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, with additions from other early book collections and from being named a "legal deposit library" for newly printed books in the United Kingdom (corresponding to our Library of Congress). Named for Sir Thomas Bodley, the Elizabethan era curator of its book and MS collections who renovated the original 1440 library building ca. 1600-2.
Oxford Corpus Christi College MS 128 of Chaucer's Canterbury tales--a digital facsimile of this important early 15th-century witness to the Tales, beginning in the midst of the General Prologue description of the Knight's son, the Squire, who "karf beforn his fader atte table," and ending in the midst of Parson's Tale. The manuscript's missing initial and final leaves are the typical result of hard use over several hundred years.
British Library Manuscript Collections: The largest single collection of English language MSS in the world, the British Library MS Collections offer some nice digitization projects as well as a robust search engine linked to a superb descriptive catalog.
Library of Congress Digitized Materials from the Rare Books and Special Collections Division: The crown jewel of the LC collections is the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection of manuscripts and rare books. Other collections of Americana are important to the study of colonial and early Republic history.
English 211: Beowulf to Dryden--Goucher course syllabus
English 215: Critical Methods--Goucher course syllabus
English 221: Theories of Composing, Teaching and Tutoring--Goucher course syllabus
English 222: Women and Literature--"Women and Inspiration"--Goucher course syllabus
ENGLISH 240: Medieval Literature--Goucher course syllabus
English 330: Chaucer Seminar--Goucher course syllabus
The Chaucer Metapage: an inspired and inspiring collection of resources for studying all medieval literature, but focused primarily on Chaucer and on his Canterbury Tales. Please note that the "MetaMentors" do not answer individual questions from students. Think about the logistics! Ask me!
The Essential Chaucer: " Mark Allen and John H. Fisher, Web production by Shannon O. Cotrell, Steve R. Levitt, and Rachael Hill. The Essential Chaucer is a selective, annotated bibliography of Chaucer studies from 1900-1984. It was first published in 1987 by G. K. Hall and Mansell Publishers Limited. The bibliography is divided into almost 90 topics, including themes, techniques, and individual works by Chaucer." The notes are short, but will point you in the right direction. It was published in conjunction with the appearance of the Riverside Chaucer in 1987, and by now both resources are showing their age. User beware.
The Medieval Review: formerly the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, this is the first and only online journal devoted to scholarly reviews of recent scholarship in medieval studies. The reviewers are experts in the specializations required for the works reviewed, which you can and should verify by doing an author search on the reviewer's name in the MLA Bibliography.
H-Net Reviews in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Though it only has been active as a scholarly reviewing site since 1998 (i.e., roughly, books published since 1996), this active site covers modern to early modern social, historical, economic, and (some) literary research. H-Net was set up to catalogue and supervise the activities of many long-lived "discussion lists" that first thrived before the WorldWideWeb came into existence. The review site is an outgrowth of the site's sponsorship of scholarly discourse on that wide range of subjects. It is hosted by Michigan State University.
Middle English vowel and consonant pronunciation examples: the Harvard U. Chaucer Seminar support site also contains other useful materials for the study of Middle English.
Boccaccio's Decameron: a contemporary of Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio's one hundred tales set in a frame narrative bears striking similarities to and differences from Canterbury Tales. This site contains information valuable to the study of medieval European culture, in general, and of framed narratives in particular. (Brown University's Italian Department hosts the site, which is maintained by a consortium of editors from numerous institutions.)
THE VICTORIAN WEB--George Landow's site for study of Victorian literature, art, philosophy, and what have you, obviously useful to students in English 212, 259, and 260. You also might want to check out "Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory," which explores some issues relating to the medium we're using here.
THE CONTEMPORARY POSTCOLONIAL AND POST IMPERIAL LITERATURE IN ENGLISH SITE--another of George Landow's sites, useful for students in English 285.
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY'S "LABYRINTH" SITE--a wealth of materials for the study of medieval literature, including access to whole texts of Chaucer's works, critical articles, historical context, etc. Note that a new Labyrinth site is being unveiled, but it is not yet complete and the old one remains the only one that is intact.
LUMINARIUM--a site containing information, including whole texts of critical articles, on medieval, renaissance, and seventeenth-century authors.
THE YALE LAW SCHOOL AVALON PROJECT: online access to primary source documents in Anglo-American law, including Blackstone's commentaries, the laws of William the Conqueror and other kings, and countless other "foundation" documents for English culture. You can even find the charter for the Maryland colony (in "Pre-18th Century Documents").
THE ON-LINE BOOKS PAGE--10,000+ editions of literary works in several languages linked to a search engine at the U.Penn server. The quality of individual editions still must be verified by the student (look for the "About this text" or similar hyperlink on the first page), but generally these are acceptable for 200-level undergraduate work and some seminar work. Because the texts are digitized, you can use "Ctl F" to search them for words & phrases.
The Chawton House (Jane Austen) Online Novel Collection: operating from the ancestral home of Jane Austen, this historical society and research foundation maintains a significant and growing database of early (C18-19) English novels, some out of print since their earliest editions. Each entry features a paragraph summary of the plot and its attractions.
THE WORLD WIDE STUDY BIBLE--now hosted on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library site, this is an accurate, searchable text base containing all the books of the Christian bible, including apocrypha. For medieval authors, the Douay-Rheims translation is closest to the Vulgate Latin text they would have known--see below for a better text of Douay-Rheims. For renaissance and seventeen-century authors, the King James Version usually will be appropriate.
THE DOUAY-RHEIMS BIBLE--after Protestant translators began flooding Europe with contending vernacular translations (i.e., English, French, German, etc. vs. the Vulgate Latin), the Catholic Church fought back by producing what they claimed (and most modern scholars believe) was a more accurate, less thesis-motivated translation of the Vulgate. All medieval scholars typically quote the Douay-Rheims, as do renaissance scholars until 1604, when the newly crowned successor to Elizabeth, James I, ordered a new translation of the bible which bears his name.
THE VULGATE LATIN BIBLE--this was the text which would have been known to Christians in Chaucer's time, with the exception of the "Lollard" followers of GC's contemporary John Wycliff, who translated portions of it into Middle English despite the threat of execution for this heretical act. The Internet Sacred Texts Archive, which maintains this site, is a non-profit group promoting understanding of many religious traditions, and they offer reading texts from Eastern, Western, traditional and esoteric religions. The text of the Latin Vulgate runs in the far right column, and the King James (1604) edition runs in the far left column. For those of you with Greek and/or Hebrew, the middle left column contains the parallel text in the Septuagint Greek edition, and the middle right contains the Hebrew Tanach edition. To see a more accurate English translation than the King James (1604), which was made with frankly Protestant interpretive practices, see the Douay-Rheims Bible (above).
THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA--an indispensable introduction for the undergraduate to the Church's view of its own beliefs, major figures, and most important events. It is not "scholarly" in the sense of being produced by scholars who are independent of papal authority, but it is a carefully checked, "doctrinally correct," vision of history. As a starting place, it's great.
LATIN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY--a searchable text base which will enable you to translate Latin words and phrases into English, especially useful in the medieval and early renaissance periods.
Nagoya University Victorian Studies Archive Concordance Site: Don't be misled. Mitsuharu Matsuoka and Masahiro Komatsu have established a very nice contextual "library" of authors and works that Victorian authors would have read. They limit their Medieval authors to Chaucer, which is probably accurate for Victorians who were not members of the Early English Text Society, but from Elizabethan authors to the early C20, they cover a surprising range. You must select your author, and your "book" or search the whole database for the author. Their digitized works are limited, but often cover works included in Goucher's English Department survey courses (e.g., for Aphra Behn, one play [The Rover] and Oroonoko).
CONCORDANCE TO SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS--
CONCORDANCE TO CHAUCER'S WORKS--Gerard NeCastro's (University of Maine, Machias) searchable word-usage list for "Canterbury Tales," "Troilus," and other works. If you "Google" the word, "concordance," you can access a wide range of concordances to the Bible in various editions, as well as some individual English authors like William Blake and Thomas Gray. Coverage depends upon the enthusiasms of the creators, and (except for NeCastro's Chaucer site) I have not investigated the scholarly reliability of any other primary source texts. User beware! You also can use printed paper concordances which you can find using OLLI and a keyword search on "concordance." I own and would be happy to share with my students and colleagues the scholarly concordances to the works of Malory and Marlowe.
OTHER CONCORDANCES--Yes, you may have to go to the library to use these, but they're easier to use. For the rationale explaining why scholars care about authors' peculiar usage patterns, see E. D. Hirsch on the "author's horizon of meaning" from Validity in Interpretation.
PROJECT PERSEUS--Tufts University maintains this searchable text base of all Classical Greek works of literature. You choose to read either Greek or English translations of the work, and can switch between the two versions.
Online Modern Language Translation Site: Good for a laugh. Don't trust it until it can get jokes and recognize ambiguity, irony, and paradox. Use of online translators for Modern Languages Department coursework specifically violates Goucher's Honor Code, and using them produces predictable and easily detectable types of errors, so don't even think about it. It's probably most useful to check single words quickly, but its vocabulary is somewhat small and limited largely to business-related terms.

Syllabus View

Chronological View

Back to English 211