IU is at the forefront of digitizing content, from books to music to archival material – and fiction is among that content. One prominent example is Wright American Fiction, a collection of important novels and fiction from the middle to the late 1800s, chosen from a survey conducted by librarian Lyle Wright. Seminal works of 19th century American fiction are present, from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but there is a lot more to discover – almost 3,000 books are included. Books can be viewed as plain text, or in scanned images of the original books.
Other full-text resources in a similar vein include Early American Fiction 1789 – 1850, which covers the period just before Wright American Fiction, and authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to Edgar Allan Poe to Nathaniel Hawthorne; American Poetry (1600-1900), which features an astounding 40,000 poems from Colonial times to the dawn of the twentieth century; and eBooks and Texts Internet Archive, a website created by the nonprofit group Internet Archive and Open Library, offering more than 10,000,000 out-of-copyright books, including children’s books, academic texts, and historical material, as well as 300,000 more modern books that can be ‘checked out’ from their site.
Need help finding other fiction resources? Ask us! iueref@iue.edu