Literature & Area Studies Collections

African American Poetry

African American Poetry contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a comprehensive survey of 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.

African Writing Collection

African Writing Collection brings together fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose originally published as part of Heinemann’s influential African Writers Series (AWS) alongside a wealth of contemporary works published since the cessation of the original series which ran from 1962-2003. The result is a rich collection of over 2800 primary texts including poems, novels, shorts stories, essays, plays, and general prose such a novellas and memoirs that provides an extensive representation of modern African literature.

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Black Short Fiction and Folklore

Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present. The materials have been compiled from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors. Some 30 percent of the collection is fugitive or ephemeral, or has never been published before.

Black Women Writers

Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African Diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, black women needed to create their own identities and movements. The collection documents that effort, presenting the woman’s perspective on the diversity and development of black people generally, and in particular the works document the evolution of black feminism.

Caribbean Literature

In this collection, students and scholars can find, view, and analyze the interplay of language and culture, for an understanding of the struggle between indigenous and European languages. For the first part of the 20th century Caribbean writers defined themselves and their culture in the languages of their colonizers. But after independence, with a new self-determination and pride of origin, authors increasingly used local styles and vocabularies.

Latin American Women Writers

This collection comprises 100,000 pages of literary works, along with memoirs and essays, in their original language, by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century to the present. It showcases how, throughout the centuries, women wrote about their families, their economic hardships, their subjugation, and their identity. It brings together all the voices of Latin American women and presents a tool for understanding the diversity and development of Latin America through a feminine perspective.

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction includes more than 100,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, novels, and more than 450 plays. Nearly all of the content is in copyright, and most of the other items are long out of print or have never before been published. Besides serving as a rich resource for literature scholars, the collection also supports the study of American history, ethnic diversity, immigrations issues, and political history.

South and Southeast Asian Literature in English

South and Southeast Asian Literature is a text-based collection that showcases the literary imagination and linguistic inventiveness of Asian writers as they negotiate their varied cultural identities. Searchable together for the first time are thousands of pages of English-language fiction, short fiction, and poems written from the end of the colonial era to the present.

Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry

A collection 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 begins with the key writers of the early decades, continues with major figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, and concludes with a considerable body of writing of the 1980s and 1990s.