LibGuides: Primary Sources: Art, Literature & Performing Arts

Art, Literature & Performing Arts

American Art-Union, 1839-1851: The Rise of American Art Literacy This link opens in a new window Meeting minutes, register of works of art, letters, letterpress books and newspaper clippings from the American Art-Union, a subscription based organisation in the U.S. whose ostensible role was to democratise and promote fine art to the American general public.
British Cartoon Archive This link opens in a new window A national collection of socio-political cartoons from British newspapers and magazines, plus comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines, from 1904 onwards.
Digital Bodleian This link opens in a new window A collection of primary and contemporary material across a wide range of subjects, with scanned images of the Bodleian Libraries special collections, including rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, art and printed ephemera.
Nazi Looted Art and Assets: Records on the Post-World War II Restitution Process (1942-1998) This link opens in a new window Covers the efforts to restore looted art during and after the Second World War including papers from fine arts and legal advisors. Also includes records of the Tripartate Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold and details on the U.S. led Safehaven Program. Includes claims from victims and negotiations and litigation for return of items to legitimate owners.
Underground and Independent Comics: Volume I and II This link opens in a new window The first database containing both scholarly and primary-source materials focused on adult comic books and graphic novels. Discover the works of artists both celebrated and overlooked, alongside interviews, criticism, and journal articles. Time coverage: 20th century onwards.

American Drama, 1714-1915 This link opens in a new window American dramatic works from 1714-1915.
Black Drama, 3rd ed This link opens in a new window 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 More than 40% of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.
British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture - Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window 19th Century arts ephemera including playbills, scripts and music scores providing details of the cultural history of Britain during this period.
Corvey Collection: Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790 - 1840 This link opens in a new window The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere -- including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more -- with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.
Eighteenth Century Drama This link opens in a new window An archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents, including playbills, theatre records and correspondence that provide social context.
English Drama This link opens in a new window Collection of verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
Great War Theatre This link opens in a new window Explore the history of theatre during the First World War. Discover long-forgotten plays and download playscripts using this freely available database.
Literature, Culture and Society in Depression Era America: Archives of the Federal Writers' Project This link opens in a new window U.S. Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) publications from 1933 to 1943. The project was government initiative set up to help unemployed Academics, post-graduate students, journalists, playwrights and novelists during the Depression era. The creative output of this project provides insights into the social and cultural history of America during this time period.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online This link opens in a new window Full text major works of poetry, prose and drama. Classical Latin and Greek literature, plus literature from the 15th to the 19th centuries are included. Read major works of literature online alongside explanatory notes and details of variations in the text.
Royal Shakespeare Company Archives: From Playwrights to Performance 1889-2013 This link opens in a new window Archives of the RSC, covering the history of performance, the RSC and its predecessor, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Includes records of performances, staging, costuming and the introduction of new technologies. It also includes photographs, prompt books, production records and many other visual records.
Samuel Beckett Manuscript Digital Project This link opens in a new window The purpose of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is to reunite the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works in a digital way, and to facilitate genetic research: the project brings together digital facsimiles of documents that are now preserved in different holding libraries, and adds transcriptions of Beckett's manuscripts, tools for bilingual and genetic version comparison, a search engine, and an analysis of the textual genesis of his works.

BFI Player This link opens in a new window On demand service streaming acclaimed, landmark and archive films from across Britain and the world. The collection focuses on British and European independent films, as well as international releases. First time users need to sign up to access all subscription content for free. Returning users need to sign-in. See More.
To sign up
1. Go to https://player.bfi.org.uk/students and create an account OR sign in if you already have one by selecting 'Already have an account? Sign in'
2. Select university from the dropdown list
3. Authenticate subscription using your university log-in

Once you've set up your subscription, you can simply login on BFI Player for the remainder of this academic year.
Film Scripts Online This link opens in a new window Authorized versions of copyrighted screenplays, from writer scripts to the director and producer’s screen interpretations.
To login, search by 'institution', 'University of Exeter'.
Hindi Cinema: Histories of Film-making This link opens in a new window Hindi Cinema features full interview rushes and actuality footage with leading personalities from the Hindi film industry, sourced from the private collection of Nasreen Munni Kabir. Also includes other documentary footage, photographs and posters. Covers 1950-2010 and covers Hindi cinema produced in Mumbai, popularly known as Bollywood.
Thomas A. Edison Papers This link opens in a new window Covering 1850-1919, this collection includes Edison's laboratory notebooks, diaries, business records, correspondence, and related materials. Also includes a collection of motion picture catalogues published between 1894-1908, advertising films, equipment, related posters, slides, lectures, and phonographs.
Through the Camera Lens: The Moving Picture World and the Silent Cinema Era, 1907-1927 This link opens in a new window The archive of the Moving Picture World magazine - the industry standard trade publication during the silent cinema era in the U.S.. The magazine reviewed current releases and published news, features, and interviews relating to all aspects of the industry.
Victorians on Film This link opens in a new window Includes collections of early films from the British Film Institute (the Victorian Collection and the Mitchell and Kenyon collection), plus a selection of films from the Eye Filmmuseum. Also contains contextual essays, video interviews and exhibitions in support of the film resources. Coverage is 1895-1913.

American Periodicals This link opens in a new window This database contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window Contains the Black Literature Index - search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 Black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals. These materials were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
SUR, 1931-1992 This link opens in a new window Complete archives of the Latin American literary magazine SUR. Also includes manuscripts from the first issue and an unpublished set of letters by the founder Victoria Ocampo. Spanish language, with searching available in Spanish or English.

Literary manuscripts are typically unpublished, draft versions of poems, plays, novels or other works, as originally produced by the authors.

Some of the collections may also contain personal archive material such as correspondence between authors, and notes on the text.

Jane Austen Manuscripts Online This link opens in a new window Online access to the collective works of Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts.
Literary Manuscripts - Berg This link opens in a new window The Berg Collection is recognised as one of the finest literary research collections in the world, Covering a broad range of authors from across the nineteenth century.
Literary Manuscripts - Leeds This link opens in a new window This resource offers literary scholars the opportunity to examine manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds.
Perdita Manuscripts This link opens in a new window The Perdita Project was set up to find and digitise early modern women authors who were lost because their writing existed only in manuscript form. The digitised manuscripts in this collection were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. Content includes accounts and receipt books, diaries, biographies, prose, poetry, psalms, travel writing, historical writing and more.
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape This link opens in a new window Discover the working methods of Romantic poets and trace the evolution of celebrated verse. Presenting the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust. Includes verse manuscripts, printed manuscripts, prose manuscripts, printed verse, correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps. Content spans from the 17th century to the 1980s.
Samuel Beckett Manuscript Digital Project This link opens in a new window The purpose of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is to reunite the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works in a digital way, and to facilitate genetic research: the project brings together digital facsimiles of documents that are now preserved in different holding libraries, and adds transcriptions of Beckett's manuscripts, tools for bilingual and genetic version comparison, a search engine, and an analysis of the textual genesis of his works.
Southern Literary Messenger: Literature of the Old South This link opens in a new window The run covers 1834-1864 and was at the time the South's (U.S.A.) most important literary periodical. Initially apolitical, by 1860, contents were proslavery and pro-South.
SUR, 1931-1992 This link opens in a new window Complete archives of the Latin American literary magazine SUR. Also includes manuscripts from the first issue and an unpublished set of letters by the founder Victoria Ocampo. Spanish language, with searching available in Spanish or English.

British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture - Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window 19th Century arts ephemera including playbills, scripts and music scores providing details of the cultural history of Britain during this period.
Digital Bodleian This link opens in a new window A collection of primary and contemporary material across a wide range of subjects, with scanned images of the Bodleian Libraries special collections, including rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, art and printed ephemera.
Welsh Ballads Online This link opens in a new window Online library of Welsh Ballads from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window Contains the Black Literature Index - search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 Black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.
Black Women Writers This link opens in a new window Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora. Coverage begins in the 18th century with narratives depicting slavery, moves through and beyond the Harlem Renaissance, and includes writers from the movements of the 1960s, covering womanism, black feminism, and related topics.
British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture - Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window 19th Century arts ephemera including playbills, scripts and music scores providing details of the cultural history of Britain during this period.
Children’s Literature and Childhood - Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window Contains material covering the experience of childhood in the long C19, including books and periodicals for children, primers and other educational material, pamphlets produced by child welfare groups, documents and photos related to children and crime, newspapers produced by youths, and more. Content is sourced from the University of Florida's Baldwin Library Collection of Historical Children's Literature, the National Archives (UK), and the British Library, among others.
Children's Literature and Culture This link opens in a new window Rare books, games, ephemera, and artwork from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the golden age of childrens literature. From mass-produced chapbooks to richly illustrated book-beautifuls, this resource examines the way in which new concepts were introduced to young readers, encouraging an engagement with the imagination which went on to fundamentally shape established notions of childhood.
Corvey Collection: Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790 - 1840 This link opens in a new window The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere -- including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more -- with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.
Early American Fiction 1789 - 1875 This link opens in a new window Collection of full text first editions of American novels and short stories. Includes those by Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, and others. Supports textual analysis of Early American fiction.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window Full text digital versions of nearly every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, spanning from 1473 to 1700, plus works in English printed elsewhere. The collection includes pamphlets, books, broadsheets, manuscripts and periodicals.
Early English Prose Fiction This link opens in a new window English prose fiction from 1500 to 1700, including works by John Bunyan, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe and Aphra Behn.
Eighteenth Century Fiction This link opens in a new window English fiction from 1700 to 1780. Including works by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift.
German Folklore and Popular Culture: Das Kloster. Scheible. This link opens in a new window A collection of magical and occult texts, chapbooks, folklore, popular superstition and fairy tales of the German Renaissance compiled by Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible, between 1845 and 1849.
Literary Studies This link opens in a new window This collection covers British and American literature including Literary manuscripts, rare printed works, and personal papers of a range of leading literary figures, as well as unique access to rare and obscure literary texts and genres.
Literature, Culture and Society in Depression Era America: Archives of the Federal Writers' Project This link opens in a new window U.S. Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) publications from 1933 to 1943. The project was government initiative set up to help unemployed Academics, post-graduate students, journalists, playwrights and novelists during the Depression era. The creative output of this project provides insights into the social and cultural history of America during this time period.
Nineteenth - Century Fiction This link opens in a new window A collection of British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903. Useful for researching different genres of fiction literature.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online This link opens in a new window Full text major works of poetry, prose and drama. Classical Latin and Greek literature, plus literature from the 15th to the 19th centuries are included. Read major works of literature online alongside explanatory notes and details of variations in the text.

African American Poetry This link opens in a new window African American poetry from 18th & 19th centuries.
Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window Contains the Black Literature Index - search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 Black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.
Canadian Poetry This link opens in a new window Canadian poetry from the 18th to the early 20th century.
Corvey Collection: Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790 - 1840 This link opens in a new window The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere -- including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more -- with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.
English Poetry This link opens in a new window Archive of English verse, including works produced in former colonial countries and lesser known poets. Use for textual and historical analysis of English poetry.
English Poetry 2nd Edition This link opens in a new window Archive of English verse, including works produced in former colonial countries and lesser known poets. Use for textual and historical analysis of English poetry.
Faber Poetry Library This link opens in a new window Collection of poetry from influential poets of the 20th Century including Thom Gunn, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney.
Literary Manuscripts - Leeds This link opens in a new window This resource offers literary scholars the opportunity to examine manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online This link opens in a new window Full text major works of poetry, prose and drama. Classical Latin and Greek literature, plus literature from the 15th to the 19th centuries are included. Read major works of literature online alongside explanatory notes and details of variations in the text.
Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement This link opens in a new window Amiri Baraka was both a poet and a political activist in the U.S. noted for his leadership of the Harlem-based Black Arts Movement. Papers include poetry, records from the variety of organisations he was involved in, print publications, articles, plays, speeches, personal correspondence, oral histories, as well as some personal records. Coverage is 1913-1998.
Twentieth-Century African American Poetry This link opens in a new window Full text database of modern and contemporary African American poetry.
Twentieth-Century English Poetry This link opens in a new window Full text database of modern and contemporary English poetry.
Walt Whitman and his Fellowship of Supporters in Bolton, 1891-1913 This link opens in a new window Contains the collected papers of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship. Includes letters, photographs and other material produced by the Bolton Whitman Fellowship during the period 1891-1913. Whitman maintained an active correspondence with the group and his inner-circle continued this tradition long after the poet’s death.
Welsh Ballads Online This link opens in a new window Online library of Welsh Ballads from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window Full text digital versions of nearly every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, spanning from 1473 to 1700, plus works in English printed elsewhere. The collection includes pamphlets, books, broadsheets, manuscripts and periodicals.
Royal Shakespeare Company Archives: From Playwrights to Performance 1889-2013 This link opens in a new window Archives of the RSC, covering the history of performance, the RSC and its predecessor, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Includes records of performances, staging, costuming and the introduction of new technologies. It also includes photographs, prompt books, production records and many other visual records.
Shakespeare Collection This link opens in a new window Contains a selection of over 200 prompt books from C17-C20; diaries of Gordon Crosse documenting 500 UK performances from 1890 to 1953; the First Folio and Quartos; editions and adaptations of Shakespeare's works from the C17, C18 & C19; plus other contemporary works. Dates covered are 1517-1975.
Shakespeare's Globe Archive: Theatres, Players & Performance This link opens in a new window This collection offers insights into the performance practice in the particular space of the reconstructed Globe Theatre. It documents over 200 performances through prompt books, wardrobe notes, programmes, publicity material, annual reports, show reports, photographs and architectural plans.
Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library This link opens in a new window Shakespeare in Performance showcases rare prompt books from the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeares plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.