Language and Literature

Though this site gives access to hundreds and hundreds of topics and individuals, it is certainly not the last word in African literature. This said, those who succeed in navigating its somewhat confusing arrangement will find it satisfies all but the most specialized research needs. -- Choice

With this site, Eidenmuller (Univ. of Texas, Tyler) provides a gateway to a number of useful resources, including the full transcribed text and, in many cases, streaming audio of numerous famous and important speeches. Most of the audio clips are in MP3 format, compatible with standard PC and Mac media players. Some speeches from the era before audio-recording technology are available in versions read by actors and other personalities (for example, Johnny Cash reads Lincoln's Gettysburg Address). The site encompasses material both in the public domain and protected by copyright (a caveat alerts users to the presence of copyrighted material and notes that its inclusion on the site is consistent with the principles of fair use for educational purposes). The site also provides links to professional resources for scholars of rhetoric, most notably the major scholarly organizations. Among the site's interesting pages: a rhetoric quiz with clips to identify from famous speeches and transcribed material for classroom exercises--an interchange from professional basketball and a dialogue from ancient Greek philosophy. Another useful page is Rhetorical Figures in Sound, a collection of audio clips illustrating more than 40 figures of speech. -– Choice

British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832

The British Women Romantic Poet's Project (BWRPP), begun in 1997, produces this online scholarly archive of e-text editions from the University of California, Davis, Shields Library Kohler collection. It includes poetry by British and Irish women written (but not necessarily published) between 1789 and 1832. -- Choice

Maintained by Mitsu Matsuoka (Nagoya Univ., Japan) this site certainly has some useful features: the texts of the Brontës' novels Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; the Brontë sisters' poetical works; and Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). -- Choice

Founded in 1985 by S. Robert Lichter and Linda Lichter, pioneers in media research, CMPA is now regarded as one of the foremost authorities on US media. As a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization committed to the study of both news and entertainment media, its goal is to provide an empirical basis for ongoing debates over media fairness and impact through well-documented, timely, and readable studies of media content. -- Choice

Were Edward R. Murrow alive today, he would likely be working with the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. Billing its work as watchdog journalism in the public interest, this organization and its site are the antithesis of sound-bite broadcast news. The thoroughness with which it has carried out its mission since its 1989 founding has garnered it accolades from major journalism groups. Projects that other news organizations cannot--or will not--undertake are investigated with ferocity by staff and a network of journalists. Along the left side of the home page one finds a Featured Projects area, which recently listed Iraq/Afghanistan Contracts (Windfalls of War), tracking US contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan; Lobby (LobbyWatch), which looks at how private interests influence public policy; and Katrina Watch, which is ongoing. -- Choice

Dedicated to Cervantes and his works, this site is informative and easy to explore. Eduardo Urbina (Texas A & M Univ.) is the project's director and editor, but the collaborators are a range of international scholars. Even though new information and articles are being added periodically, the site now stands as one of the best dedicated to Spain's greatest writer. -- Choice

This site provides rich resources in children's literature for teachers, librarians, scholars, parents, and even children. David K. Brown, Director of the Doucette Library of Teaching Resources at the University of Calgary in Canada, has done a fine job organizing Internet resources in the area of children's literature. -- Choice

Provided by the Humanities Text Initiative of the University of Michigan, this Web site in many ways supplants Eugene Irey's A Concordance to the Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, available at (among other places) The Walden Woods Projecthttp://www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau/about2/E/Emerson_Ralph_Waldo/Concordance. -– Choice

The Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) is a unique and vital gathering place for books, ideas, and expertise in the field of children's and young adult literature. The CCBC is a noncirculating examination, study, and research library for Wisconsin school and public librarians, teachers, early childhood care providers, university students, and others interested in children's and young adult literature. The CCBC is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) School of Education (SoE), and receives additional support from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI).

The mission of the Electronic Literature Foundation (ELF) is to produce advanced electronic texts for the benefit of students, scholars, and admirers of literature around the world. Our goal is to provide free access to a variety of texts from world literature available in several languages and/or editions, with forums for communication regarding these works, for all types of readers. -- From web site. Recommended by Choice

ESLgold is a free, highly developed site for individuals wanting to practice English language skills, including speaking, listening, reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary; it includes links for business English. All materials are organized by skill and level (low beginning to advanced) for easy access. The site provides some of its own materials but also links to other well-respected language learning Web sites. -- Choice

Quilter began this site in 1994, out of enthusiasm for the subject and because no similar Web pages existed. With considerable volunteer help, it has grown into a large collection of bibliographies and checklists--recommended reading lists, author indexes, critical works, Web sites--related to feminist science fiction and fantasy. Acknowledging that feminist is a broad term, Quilter extends the site's scope to pro-feminine material and works that explore gender issues, advocate gender equality, and/or feature strong women characters. The design is low-tech: the home page comprises a clickable menu bar and table of contents in outline form, but what various categories offer is not always clear. Reviews and bibliographic information are provided when available. Links lead to lists of works by theme (matriarchies, alien biology, warrior women, etc.); bibliographies by format (anime, film, graphic novels); lists of journals, newsletters, and films; biographical detail on authors; and guides to the online feminist SF community. -- Choice

Stephensen-Payne, a publisher with a passion for author bibliographies, created this Web site in 2000 to track published bibliographies of science fiction and fantasy writers, and its scope has expanded greatly since then. -– Choice

Hosted by the American Studies Group at University of Virginia, this resource has been in existence for almost ten years. It provides full-text access to a variety of literary and scholarly hypertexts written by notable authors and scholars. Most of these writers are American, but other nationalities are included. What exactly is hypertext? The OED Online defines it as text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders. Displayed via computer, hypertext is interconnected so that the user can navigate from one document to another resource at any point. -– Choice

This ambitious, impressive-looking site, originally developed by Michael Best (Univ. of Victoria) in 1996, but substantially redesigned in 2005, aims to inspire a love of Shakespeare's works in a world-wide audience. -- Choice

This is an important site for anyone interested in free speech issues on the Internet. It focuses on lawsuits, cease and desist letters, subpoenas, and other legal threats directed at those who engage in online speech.

The collection begins with the observations of early English explorers in the 17th century and ends at 1924. The scope is primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. Some are traditional canonical texts, but most are less known and more difficult to find in print. –- Choice

As its name implies, this site started out as a discussion list for scholars in the field of linguistics. Now based at Eastern Michigan University, it has become the most important portal for the field. It serves as an international clearinghouse for professional news, announcements, job postings, reviews, directories (of people, organizations, funding sources, conferences, academic programs, software, and more), and other information of interest primarily to faculty and graduate students. -- Choice

Created and maintained at the University of Buffalo (UB) and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this is a collection of literary, historical, and culturally significant texts written in languages other than English. Designed to facilitate meaningful engagement with important documents to promote language study and knowledge of other traditions and cultures, the collection is vetted and published by volunteer experts from various fields. -– Choice

The Museum of Broadcast Communications, founded in 1987 in Chicago, offers this Web site, requiring free registration, as an extension of the museum's mission, which reads in part to collect, preserve and present historic and contemporary radio and television content as well as educate, inform, and entertain through ... online access to our resources. -– Choice

This Web site (first reviewed CH, Oct'01, 39-0795) continues to provide a wealth of resources for study and teaching. Its rich, comprehensive list of online sources includes texts, journals, societies, conferences, and calls for papers. Although several other Web sites (e.g., Chaucer Metapage, CH, Sup'01, 38Sup-154) now provide similar sets of links, the present site is more focused. The real gem here is Chaucer Bibliography Online, accessible from the banner across the top of the home page. -– Choice

This site is the perfect analogue for the sprawling subject of communications and for the tricky act of communicating. A treasure trove, it presents some challenges for users seeking specific items. Major sections cover advertising, cultural studies, digital media, film, gender and race, health and science, journalism, media, political communication, rhetorical studies, social science, Internet mailing lists, and journals. -- Choice

This impressive site--launched in 2003 by a former Washington Times reviewer stationed as a Marine reservist in Kuwait--aims to be the best free Web site containing Shakespeare's complete works. As with more established, but less technologically sophisticated sites such as The Works of the Bard (http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~matty/Shakespeare) and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (CH, Nov'97, 35-1364), the texts offered here derive from the freely available Complete Moby Shakespeare, which is based on the 1866 Globe Edition of the complete works. -– Choice

Designed for students and professors, The Poetess Tradition offers access to a growing library of primary and secondary resources by and about popular 19th-century sentimental poets, spanning Great Britain, 1773-1839; America, 1773-1865; and the transatlantic area, 1770-1900. The site includes, in addition to poetry that was conventionally ignored by the literary canon, works of commentary and criticism of the poetess genre that are contemporary to the original publication of the poetry, and 20th- and 21st-century criticism. -- Choice

A remarkable resource for Francophone African women writers, this Web site is imaginative and easy to navigate. Want to know something about a particular writer? A click on a name in the alphabetical list brings up a short biography/bibliography: a few are in English or Spanish, most are in French (but another click provides the same information in English for most). -- Choice

Created and maintained at the University of Toronto, this site surveys 1,400 years of poetry in English, from the Anglo-Saxon Daedmon to American Mark Doty (b. 1953). -- Choice

With the assistance of his students and many outside contributors, linguistics professor Weinberger (George Mason U.) has compiled an extensive collection of audio clips demonstrating speech accents from around the world. The data set, updated weekly, contains over 750 samples, all in QuickTime format. –- Choice

Started in 2002, this highly developed Web site devoted to ESL teaching and learning includes several varieties of English but British English dominates. Users have the option of registering (for free), but lots of information is available without registering. The site includes a reference section--offering grammar, idioms, and phrasal and irregular verbs--and hundreds of good online ESL quizzes and worksheets. -– Choice

The Walden Woods Project preserves the land, literature and legacy of Henry David Thoreau to foster an ethic of environmental stewardship and social responsibility.