A package of new databases is now available from the Library website. The Alexander Street Literature package includes databases covering a range of fields; from women's writing to Caribbean literature, to writing from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Black Short Fiction and Folklore
This database includes 8000 stories, folktales, and fables - many stemming from an oral tradition hundreds of years old. All entries come from Africa and the African diaspora.
Complete runs of selected literary magazines are included in the database, as well as North American, black-owned and edited journals and newspapers.
Texts are presented in their original language, including some, like the Gullah language of South Carolina, which have their origins in African countries and are still present in regions far from their source.
Black Women Writers
This database includes 100 000 pages of fiction, poetry and essays, by women from Africa and the African diasporas. The database includes work from three continents and a range of cultures, thereby offering a nuanced perspective of the sexism and racism that many black women face.
Caribbean Literature
Caribbean Literature includes 100 000 pages of poetry and fiction from every Caribbean country. Entries stem from the nineteenth and twentieth century, including texts from the Spanish and French colonies of the 1800s.
Novels, short stories and poems will be supplemented by interviews, reference works, and dictionaries of various Creole languages.
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
This database includes eighty volumes of poetry by Irish women writing between 1768-1842.
Most of the texts in the database exist in print in fewer than 5 libraries across the world. Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period therefore allows these authors to speak to a new generation of scholars and students.
Poetic texts are presented alongside biographical and critical essays. For some poets these essays will be the only substantial scholarly assessment available that details their life and works.
Latino Literature
Latino Literature includes over 100 000 pages of fiction and poetry representing Chicano culture and the various ethnicities of Latin American writers working in the US. The majority of entries represent Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, but also included is writing from Argentina, Dominican Republic, and other Central and South American countries.
The database includes nineteenth century material but most of the entries were written after the Chicano renaissance.
The database includes hundreds of pages of Chicano folklore, 500 photos documenting Hispanic Theatre activities, plus four recordings of theatrical performance from the 1980s. All texts and recordings are in their original language - either English or Spanish.
Roughly 30% of the Latino Literature database is made up of work that has previously been unpublished.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
This database is comprised of sixty volumes of work, including the work of 47 authors.
Accompanying texts to the poetry is extensive, and includes biographies, essays and selected criticism.
South and Southeast Asian Literature
This database includes literature in English by writers who were born or identify themselves with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Fiji.
There is a focus on work written during the late-colonial and postcolonial eras. Much of the writing deals with the British Empire and its legacy; struggles for independence; the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan; the Bangladeshi war for independence from Pakistan; continuing conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil minority; and issues surrounding racism, and the caste system.