LibGuides: Arts & Humanities: English

The Maughan Library

Print books, journals and DVDs for English can be found at the Maughan Library. Discover material using Library Search and the A-Z Databases:

Library Search

A-Z Databases

Focus on Shakespeare

Shakespeare in Performance (Adam Matthew Primary Sources) This resource features the world-famous prompt book collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The prompt book is the main copy of a production script. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
Shakespeare Survey Shakespeare Survey hosted on Cambridge Core platform is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism.Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year's textual and critical studies and of major British performances.
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online This release of the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced between 1960 and 2011. The scope is international, with coverage extending to more than 120 languages and representing every country in North America, South America, and Europe and nearly every country in Asia, Africa, and Australasia. The more than 128,200 records in this version cite several hundred thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Royal Shakespeare Company Collection These high-definition, surround-sound recordings of William Shakespeare’s plays featuring the world’s best Shakespearean actors, like David Tennant, Sir Antony Sher, Paapa Essiedu, and Simon Russell Beale, and directors like Robin Lough and Dewi Humphrey. The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection brings The Tempest, King Lear, Hamlet and other famous performances filmed at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon theater to classrooms around the world. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.

Dictionaries

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) The accepted authority on the evolution of English language, this is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words. Traces the usage of words through quotations from a range of international English language sources. Updated quarterly.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography An illustrated collection of more than 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past. Updated 3 times a year with new biographies and additions to articles already published.
Dictionary of Old English: A - Le The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (600 - 1150 A.D.) of the English language, using today's most advanced technology. The Dictionary draws on as wide a range of texts in date, dialect and genre as possible. It differs from previous dictionaries in several important features: a listing in a simplified paradigmatic order of every spelling which is attested for a word in the Electronic Corpus; frequency counts for each word in the corpus so that readers can know what proportion of the evidence has been cited; usage labels where they are statistically significant, noting restrictions to a class of texts, to an author, or to a particular period or dialect; exhaustive citation for all words of twelve or fewer occurrences. 
Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus is an online database consisting of at least one copy of every surviving Old English text. In some cases, more than one copy is included, if it is significant because of dialect or date. As such, the DOE Web Corpus represents over three million words of Old English and fewer than a million words of Latin, or almost five times the collected works of Shakespeare.Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.

Collections Guide for English

Welcome to the Collections Guide for English

This guide provides tailored information on library collections and links to some of our key resources.

Handbooks and companions

Explore the literature collections of a range of scholarly handbooks and companions.

Blackwell Reference Online Blackwell Reference Online is an online library giving access to over 500 reference ebooks. The collection covers topics from across the humanities and social sciences and includes the critically-acclaimed Blackwell Companions and Handbooks in addition to other valuable reference materials such as dictionaries, encyclopedias and concise companions with integrated seamless links to standalone major reference works on the Blackwell Reference Online platform.
Cambridge Companions Online (CCO) Cambridge Companions hosted on Cambridge Core platform are series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods. CCO offers thousands of comprehensive and accessible essays on major authors, periods and genres, written by experts and designed for student readers.King's users have access to the complete collection of Cambridge Companions, which is divided into three subsections: Literature and Classics; Philosophy, Religion and Culture; and Music.
Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge Histories Online hosted on Cambridge Core platform offer access to over 400 volumes published since 1960. The Cambridge Histories series is one of the most trusted reference collections in the academic world, with over 300 titles spanning 15 subject areas. Subject areas include: American History, British History, Economic History, General History, History of Science, History of the Book, Language & Linguistics, Literary Studies, Music, Philosophy, Political & Social Theory, Regional History, Religious Studies, Theatre Studies & Performing Arts and Warfare.
Oxford Bibliographies Online Oxford Bibliographies Online combines elements of an annotated bibliography and an encyclopaedia to offer a time-saving resource. Annotations indicate what is included in the work whilst personalisation features allow saving, annotating and sharing of citations and searches. King's has access to the following modules:  African American StudiesBiblical StudiesClassicsIslamic StudiesPhilosophyVictorian Literature
Oxford Handbooks Online Oxford Handbooks Online covers many different subject areas and the series contains in-depth, high-level articles by scholars at the top of their field. King's has access to all collections.
Oxford Reference Online Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection brings together 100 well-known and trusted dictionaries, reference books and Encyclopedias, into a single cross-searchable web database. The Premium Collection offers all of these, plus added functionality and more detailed information from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions Series, plus the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. ORO provides integrated, consistent coverage of a broad range of subjects: everything from General Reference, Language and Quotations to Science and Medicine, and from Humanities and Social Sciences to Business and Professional.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online Oxford’s scholarly editions provide trustworthy, annotated primary texts for scholars and students. OSEO currently includes writers active between 701 and 1901, plus Classical Latin and Greek authors from Aristotle, Austen, Bentham, Catullus, Dickens, and Donne through to Plato, Virgil and Wordsworth. It contains over 1,500 scholarly editions — the equivalent of more than 760,000 print pages.
Oxford Scholarship Online An essential research resource for students, scholars, and academics, Oxford Scholarship Online provides access to prestigious academic books across the humanities, social sciences, sciences, medicine. Available online on Oxford Academic, scholars and students can discover these academic books alongside Handbooks, Very Short Introductions, practitioner medicine and psychology texts, and hundreds of the highest quality journals. King's subscribes to the full or partial sets listed below and has access to some additional single titles:Business & ManagementClassical Studies 2007 – 2013Economics & FinanceHistory 2011 – 2013LawLiterature 2011 – 2013Music 2011 – 2013PhilosophyPolitical ScienceReligion

Theatre & performance

American Drama 1714–1915 Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 reflects American dramatic writing in all its richness and diversity: plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented. Major dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller. Coverage: 1714 - 1915Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Asian American Drama Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late 19th century and progresses to the writings of contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga. The plays themselves have been selected using leading bibliographies and with the editorial advice of Josephine D. Lee, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Esther S. Kim, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; James S. Moy, University of New Mexico; and Karen Shimakawa, University of California, Davis.Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Black Drama: Third Edition Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. 
Contemporary World Drama Contemporary World Drama examines the richness and diversity of contemporary theatre and drama from a global context. This collection brings together new work from established and up-and-coming contemporary playwrights from around the world, including recently produced world premieres, previously unpublished works, from every continent. At completion, the collection will include 1,000 contemporary plays, from 2000 to present day.
Drama Online (Bloomsbury) Drama Online is a digital storehouse of recordings, play texts and contextual academic information, containing over 3,000 playtexts, over 400 audio plays, 345 hours of video and over 400 books of criticism and performance practice from leading theatre publishers and companies. King's College subscription covers: Bloomsbury and Faber Core Collection (all content up to 2021 included) Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018)Shakespeare & Early Modern Drama VideoShakespeare’s Globe on Screen (2008-2015)
Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage A unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays, featuring: Primary source documents; the focus of which is the Larpent collection of plays and Anna Larpent's Diaries The London Stage Database; The Biographical Dictionary Database Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
English Drama English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas, including works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
National Theatre Collection 1 and 2 National Theatre Collection brings the stage to life through access to high definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies. Through a collaboration with the U.K.'s National Theatre, this collection offers a range of digital performance resources never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive.   
Performing Arts Periodicals Database (1864-) This database provides indexing and abstracts for around 400 international periodicals, plus full text for more than 160 of the indexed journals. The database currently includes almost a million records, the majority from the most recent ten years of each journal. Performing Arts Periodicals Database covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television and more. 
Twentieth Century North American Drama, 2nd Edition Twentieth Century North American Drama: Second Edition contains 2,050+ plays from the United States and Canada. In addition to providing a comprehensive full-text resource for students in the performing arts, the collection offers a unique window into the economic, historical, social, and political psyche of two countries. Scholars and students who use the database will have a new way to study the signal events of the twentieth century—including the Depression, the role of women, the Cold War, and more—through the plays and performances of writers who lived through these decades.

Poetry

African American Poetry The early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry Prince's 'Bars Fight', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
American Poetry American Poetry contains over 40,000 poems by more than 200 poets, covering the Colonial period to the early twentieth century, and drawn from over 1,200 printed sources. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
English Poetry English Poetry contains essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets are drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources. Coverage: 1700–1780Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
English Poetry, Second Edition Adding a further 20,000 poems to the original collection, English Poetry, Second Edition contains over 183,000 poems. Essentially comprising the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th, its works are drawn from nearly 4,900 printed sources and represent more than 2,700 poets. The newly-added works represent both the literary heritages of Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries and the poetic legacies of English writers only recently brought back to scholarly attention.Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Faber Poetry Library The Faber Poetry Library contains the works of 50 poets comprising 140 volumes of poetry. The authors are all part of the Faber Poetry list and the database enjoys the active support of the publisher and the poets or their estates. Authors covered include Simon Armitage, Rupert Brooke, Wendy Cope, T. S. Eliot, Lavinia Greenlaw, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, David Jones, Louis MacNeice, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Sylvia Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender and Edward Thomas. Coverage: 1925 - 1999 Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Twentieth-Century African American Poetry A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove. Coverage: 1901 - 1999 Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.

Newspapers

UK and international newspapers are useful for a range of subjects. Our collection provides a range of historical titles and current editions.

Find more to read with Libby

Read for pleasure or expand your horizons with our selection of popular fiction, non-fiction and general interest titles on Libby. Choose from
audiobooks, ebooks and magazines.

Libby App This link opens in a new window With the Libby App you can enjoy free ebook novels and audiobooks. Here's how to access:1. Download the Libby App or open Libby on your device2. Search for King's College London3. Sign in with your King's credentials4. Browse, borrow and read!Libby on Windows, Mac, and ChromebooksLibby on iOS devicesLibby on Android devices

Find literature online for English

Literature Online (LION) Literature Online is a fully searchable library of over 330,000 works of English and American poetry, drama, and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key secondary sources. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
MLA International Bibliography and Periodicals Directory Covers folklore, languages, linguistics and literature. Provides citations for items from journals and series published worldwide from 1926 to date. Indexes books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies. Available via EBSCOhost. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Literary Studies Literary manuscripts, rare printed works, and personal papers of a range of leading literary figures, as well as unique access to a goldmine of rare and obscure literary texts and genres. This collection provides students and scholars of British and American literature with an invaluable access to a rich seam of resources to support in-depth study in this field. Highlights include:Holograph copies and early editions of books by George Eliot, including several volumes of the seminal work of English literature MiddlemarchAutograph manuscript of The Ring and the Book and several early editions of Robert Browning’s poetryPersonal papers, literary manuscripts and correspondence of Charlotte, Maria and Emily BrontëManuscripts and correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, including early draft versions and corrected proofs of Walden, or Life in the Woods Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.

Find print books for English

Key classmarks for English literature: Round Reading Room Maughan Library Covid QR code

PR1-9680 - English literature
PR1-56 - Literary history & criticism
PR161-488 - By period
PR500-614 - Poetry
PR621-744 - Drama
PR750-890 - Prose
PR911-918 - Letters

Key classmarks for Literature:

PN1-16790 - Literature General
PN45-57 - Theory
PN80-99 Criticism
PN441-1009.5 - Literary history
PN1010-1525 - Poetry
PN1600 - 3307 - Drama
PN2000-3307 - Theatre
PN3311-3503 - Prose fiction
PN6130-6140 Letters

PA5000-5660 - Byzantine and modern Greek literature
PJ7501-8517 - Arabic literature
PK2030-2142 - Hindi, Hindustani literatures
PK2151-2212 - Urdu literature
PL8009.5-8014 - African literature
PN801-820 - Romance Literature
PN821-840 - Germanic Literature
PQ4001-5999 - Italian literature
PR1-9680 - English literature
PS1-3626 - American literature

Writing periods

Early American Fiction 1789–1875 Early American Fiction 1789–1875 offers the full text of 875 first editions of American novels and short stories by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, as well as a host of minor writers of the period. This unique collection of American fictional prose is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia Library, and published by ProQuest in collaboration with the University of Virginia. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Early English Books Online eBooks (EEBO) Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of works printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War. The collection now contains more than 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Subject areas covered include: English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.King’s has access to:• All four EEBO collections - STC, Wing, the Thomason Tracts and the Tract Supplement • EEBO-TCP Phase I • EEBO-TCP Phase II • Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) cross-searching
Early English Prose Fiction A collection of more than 200 works from the period 1500–1700, exploring the rich diversity of prose fiction in English in the period preceding the emergence of the realist novel as its dominant form. Early English Prose Fiction offers the full text of works by key writers such as John Bunyan, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe and Aphra Behn, and has been produced in association with the Salzburg Centre for Research on the Early English Novel (SCREEN). Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Early European Books Collections Early European Books provides scholars with new ways of accessing and exploring all works printed in Europe before 1701, drawing together a diverse array of printed sources, regardless of language, as well as works published further afield. Developed and produced in close collaboration with scholars, rare book librarians, bibliographers, and other experts from the library world, this resource offers full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of some of the world's most significant collections of early printed books in Europe.King's College London has access to:Early European Books Collection 1 - 4Early European Books Wellcome Trust Collection
Eighteenth-Century Fiction A collection of 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700–1780 by writers from the British Isles. Key figures covered include Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. In addition to a scanned version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the collection also contains two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) (Gale Primary Sources) Access to the digital images of every page of over 180,000 titles published during the 18th Century including books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. Full-text searching offers access to information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction A collection of 250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, stretching from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s. Major novelists of the period such as Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and the Brontës feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children's literature. Coverage: 1782 - 1903 Senate House resources require registering for Senate House library membership. See also our library FAQ for more details.

Find Arts & Humanities literature online

The following eresources cover a range of disciplines:

Proquest Arts & Humanities collection A collection of ProQuest databases in the Arts & Humanities subject area for King's users. Additional databases may be available via Senate House
JSTOR ebooks and journals JSTOR offers academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Via JSTOR books, King's currently has access to over 54,000 titles from over 42 publishers.King’s subscribes to the following collections within JSTOR: 19th Century British PamphletsArts & Sciences I-XV CollectionBusiness I CollectionBusiness II CollectionIreland CollectionJewish StudiesLanguage & Literature CollectionLife Sciences CollectionMusic CollectionPolitical ScienceFilm StudiesLanguage and LiteraturePhilosophyReligionSociologyBusiness and Economics
Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) PAO – formerly PCI Full Text - is a major online periodical archive that contains hundreds of journal backfiles in the humanities and social sciences. The date range is 1770-2000. A hive of hundreds of digitised journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences. It provides researchers with access to more than 200 years of scholarship, spread across a wide variety of subject areas. Please note King's College London users have access to Collections 1 to 10 and JISC special collections 1 and 2.
Project MUSE Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery. King's only subscribes to selected journals.
Ebook Central - King's Ebook Central is an ebook platform. King’s have purchased over 21,200 titles covering a range of subjects and provides further access to over 176,350 titles.
Humanities Index (1962-) An international abstracting and indexing tool available via ProQuest for research in the humanities. HI indexes over 400 internationally respected humanities journals and weekly magazines published in the UK and other English speaking countries, as well as quality newspapers published in the UK. It covers current affairs, political science, religion, law, history, archaeology, education, economics, environment and gender studies.Updated monthly with approximately 1,500 records added; it also has the capability to link to electronic full text of many journal articles

Journals for English

JSTOR ebooks and journals JSTOR offers academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Via JSTOR books, King's currently has access to over 54,000 titles from over 42 publishers.King’s subscribes to the following collections within JSTOR: 19th Century British PamphletsArts & Sciences I-XV CollectionBusiness I CollectionBusiness II CollectionIreland CollectionJewish StudiesLanguage & Literature CollectionLife Sciences CollectionMusic CollectionPolitical ScienceFilm StudiesLanguage and LiteraturePhilosophyReligionSociologyBusiness and Economics

One of the best known collections of journal articles relevant to the Arts & Humanities is JSTOR, which focuses on older journal articles. There are many other collections which offer more recent articles of a similar academic standard.

You can use Library Search to access an extensive selection of ejournals and print journals. Titles include:

Essays in Criticism
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance
MLN / Modern Language Notes
Shakespeare Quarterly

Arts & Humanities print journals are held on the ground floor of the Maughan Library. These are reference only and cannot be taken out of the library.

Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) PAO – formerly PCI Full Text - is a major online periodical archive that contains hundreds of journal backfiles in the humanities and social sciences. The date range is 1770-2000. A hive of hundreds of digitised journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences. It provides researchers with access to more than 200 years of scholarship, spread across a wide variety of subject areas. Please note King's College London users have access to Collections 1 to 10 and JISC special collections 1 and 2.
Project MUSE Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery. King's only subscribes to selected journals.

Senate House Library

Senate House Library is a large humanities research library in Bloomsbury.

King’s staff and students are entitled to free membership which provides
borrowing rights to print books and remote access to most eresources.

See Membership for information on signing up.