Opposing Viewpoints

The LRC has just subscribed to a trial edition of the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center . This would be an excellent resource for those ENGL 108 or 111 students who are working on any research into current / controversial issues (particularly debates!). This resource contains full-text content from scholarly journals, magazines, and multimedia, along with with articles from the Opposing Viewpoints series of books. We have access for one month, and please feel free to alert your students to its existence. If you have any feedback about this product (or would like to see us subscribe), please let me know.

Favourite Medieval / Renaissance Sites

The Literatures in English Section of the Association of College and University Libraries recently had a great discussion of Medieval and Renaissance websites on its listserv. Some of the most promising sources (in no particular order):

• One of my personal favourites is the British Library’s Treasures in Full, entire digitized manuscripts, includin ghte Caxton Chaucer, Malory’s Arthurian Manuscript, and the Gutenburg Bible.
• The Word on the Street: A collection of broadsides from the National Library of Scotland.
• Originally published in the April 2005 edition of College and Research Libraries News, John Jaeger and Paul Victor Jr.’s “Medieval Studies: Gateways, Subject Guides, and More” provides a detailed list of internet resources.
  
• The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads includes scanned and digitized copies of over 30, 000 broadside ballads.
• Exploring Luminarium is always fruitful.
• Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service.
  
• The University of Toronto’s Lexicons of Early Modern English “searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1702.”
  
• McMaster University has produced an impressive Beowulf in Hypertext site.
  
• The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies has an excellent selection of resources for electronic research.
• The Voice of the Shuttle’s Anglo-Saxon & Medieval Links and Renaissance & 17th Century Links are incredibly rich resources.
  
• Other suggestions included databases such as Project Muse or JStor, along with the rather unusual choice of PubMed (a major medical database), searching for “Literature, Medieval” and/or “History, Medieval” in the MeSH Major Topic field.

(More) New Materials in the LRC: October 11

More, more, more . . .

Louise Erdrich
Baptism of Desire: Poems
New York: Perennial, 1989
City Centre, Main Collection, PS3555 .R42 B3 2001

This rich book will attract Erdrich fans. Like Jacklight, her first book of poems, it has tales of Potchikoo, a Chippewa Trickster, and of Mary Kroger, a butcher’s wife. In the complex and masterful “Hydra,” a poem written during pregnancy, Erdrich addresses both the mythical serpent and her unborn child–“Blessed one, beating your tail across heaven,/ uncoiling through the length of my life”–and compares herself to both Mary and Eve. Writing “Snake of hard hours, you are my poetry,” she concludes, like Eve, that its place is “at my ear.” As in a sequence on saints and sacraments, Erdrich here appropriates and transforms the Catholic theology learned as a child. A graceful, deeply metaphoric sequence on gardening, childrearing, and marriage concludes the book. — Library Journal

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Rose Marie Burwell
Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels
Cambridge UP, 1996

When Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 he left four unfinished works–A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and an untitled work on his travels in Africa. The edited versions that have come down to readers and scholars of Hemingway appear as distinct, disjointed texts that fit oddly into his oeuvre. Through extensive literary detective work Burwell has uncovered substantial evidence that Hemingway in fact designed the three published works as a trilogy, what she terms “his own Portrait of the Artist.” — From the publisher

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Patricia Waugh
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
London : Routledge, 1984
City Centre Campus, Main Collection, PN3335 .W38 1996

Metafiction begins by surveying the state of contemporary fiction in Britain and America and explores the complex political, social and economic factors which influence critical judgment of fiction. The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. — From the publisher

See below for more new materials in the LRC

English Short Title Catalogue FREE from the British Library

In addition to providing some fabulous online exhibitions and learning resources, the British Library is now providing FREE online access to the English Short Title Catalogue. A resource that should be familiar to many researchers, the ESTC was previously only available though subscription.

Some information about the ESTC from the British Library:

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) covers monograph and serial letterpress items:

• Printed before 1801.
• Printed in the British Isles, Colonial America, United States of America (1776-1800), Canada, or territories governed by Britain, in all languages.
• Printed in any other part of the world, wholly or partly in English or other British vernaculars.
• With false imprints claiming publication in London, in any language