Search the Library's Resources
The best databases for this course are:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by
This collection includes poems and plays that were not included in Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623 to make one complete, authentic collection.
The Arden Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations by
Who said, 'Neither a lender nor a borrower be'? Who are the 'star-crossed lovers'? Which Shakespearean lady protests too much? With over 3,000 quotes, from single lines to quite long extracts, organised by topic and by play, this is an essential book for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare. The key word index makes it easy to use and it also includes a glossary of unfamiliar terms and a brief biography of Shakespeare. The dictionary is easy to dip into by word or theme (love, greed, disease, war etc) or by play, and the indexes allow readers to track down a half-remembered quote easily. Both useful and entertaining, The Arden Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations is an ideal companion for students, teachers or performers of Shakespeare.
Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective by
Words and dictionaries from the British Isles in historical perspective brings together a wide range of current work on English-language lexicography and lexicology by a team of twelve contributors working in England, continental Europe, and North America. Fredric Dolezal's opening essay offers a provocative discussion of how the history of English lexicography has been, and might in the future be, written. The next four papers deal with the medieval and early modern periods: Carter Hailey investigates the dictionary evidence for individual lexical creativity in a discussion of Chaucer and the Middle English Dictionary; Gabriele Stein shows how early modern English dictionaries handled lexicological questions rather than simply listing words and equivalents; R. W. McConchie analyzes the biographical record of the lexicographer Richard Howlet, and Paola Tornaghi presents and discusses an unpublished source for the seventeenth-century lexicography of Old English. Three papers on the long eighteenth century follow: Noel Osselton's is an analysis of the alphabet fatigue which led many early lexicographers to treat words at the end of the alphabetical sequence more tersely than words at the beginning; Elisabetta Lonati's shows the engagement of John Harris's Lexicon technicum with one of the sources of its medical vocabulary; Charlotte Brewer's discusses the under-representation of eighteenth-century material in the Oxford English Dictionary. In the last three papers, Julie Coleman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Farmer and Henley's Slang and its analogues; Peter Gilliver draws on the Oxford English Dictionary archives to tell the story of an important editorial crisis; and Laura Pinnavaia discusses the syntactic flexibility of a set of idioms in a corpus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose. The volume as a whole offers new discoveries and important analytical and conceptual work, and is an essential text in the developing field of the history of lexicography.
English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century by
This volume highlights the connections that link both literary discourse and the discourse about literature to the conceptual or representational frameworks, practices, and cognitive results (the 'truths') of disciplines such as psychology, medicine, epistemology, anthropology, cartography, chemistry, and rhetoric. Literature and the sciences, embedded as they are in specific historical circumstances, thus emerge as fields of inquiry and representation which share a number of assumptions and are determined or constructed by several modes of cross-fertilization. The range of authors examined includes Richard Brome, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Smollett, while emphasis is placed on how authors of literature regard the practices, practitioners and findings of science, as well as on how 'mimesis' intersects with scientific discourse. Contributors are Bernhard Klein, Daniel Essig Garc a, George Rousseau, Jorge Bastos da Silva, Kate De Rycker, Maria Avxentevskaya, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, Mihaela Irimia, Richard Nate, and Wojciech Nowicki.
London and Literature, 1603–1901 by 
