About literaryhistory.com

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"Because internet users deserve better information"

Literaryhistory.com catalogs credible literary criticism on nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature that is available on the free internet. It offers something that only the internet can provide: an integration of the resource catalogue and the resources themselves. The critical articles are selected by the editor, based on the criteria of our selection policy. This site is intended to be a demonstration project, to show what would be possible if there were many good, open access articles on the internet, and if they were accessible through some filtered, analyzed source. But our coverage of literary figures is inevitably limited to the articles that are freely available online, so this is no substitute for a real research in an academic library.

Whatever its limitations, the reality is that many students use the free internet to find information about literature, and a much larger audience of readers doesn't have the opportunity to use an academic research library, or the expensive, library-issued passwords to use proprietary online materials. For various reasons, many people who would not undertake research in a traditional library find it appealing and easy to use the internet to get information. While students might be missing out on the genuine research experience, their teachers should see this widespread use of the internet as a blessing as well as a curse. There are a lot more people looking things up than ever did before, and that gives us a chance to reach a new, larger audience for literature.

But it's just not possible for literary scholarship to make a wholesale shift from a paid-for, subscription-based model to a free one, some critics say. And it's true, there are many costs associated with publishing, and someone must pay. The economic constraints are different, and harder to overcome, in the humanities than in the sciences (where authors are now routinely asked to pay journals for open-access publishing). Even funders like the National Endowment for the Humanities and big foundations do not necessarily insist on open-access publishing when they donate to the digital humanities. In literary studies a few scholarly journals are freely available online, but one assumes they have either very generous departments and universities supporting them or very dedicated editors.

This still doesn't justify the poor offerings of literary criticism on the internet for many major authors, not to mention the hit or miss quality of Google-based research. What if scholarly journals that now maintain a web site only as a place to post their masthead were to donate five articles each, simply by making them openly available at their site? Or they could post online the first page of representative articles. Steps like this would greatly enrich the knowledge base of the internet, while costing the scholarly community little. They might attract new readers and subscribers. It might even come to be considered an honor if the journal selected your article to be posted, which could bring you wider readership. Those are the self-interested arguments for more public scholarship, but there's the altruistic reason as well. We are educators after all, so shouldn't we be trying to reach students who do actually hunger for real literary analysis, who are looking for it on the internet?

There needs to be better information here, and there also has to be a better way of finding the credible information that does exist on the free internet. Web search engines, no matter how refined their algorithms, do not have the ability to make the careful distinctions that scholars and librarians are trained to make. At literaryhistory.com the editor screens internet articles, cataloging some and rejecting others based on our selection criteria. It's an approach similar to the traditional "recommended reading list" in college classes. In an ideal world, specialists on authors would select the links in internet bibliographies, in the same way they have traditionally recommended critical articles and books. If internet bibliographies were supervised by subject specialists, the most glaring problem of doing research on the internet - the lack of quality control - might be solved. Peer review is, of course, the gold standard for quality control.

We challenge all this web site's users, but especially teachers, professors, and librarians, to compare our links on any author to the results of a Google search on the same author. You will get from Google mostly anonymous web sites, containing unsigned articles, not reviewed by peers or even an editor, repeating the same basic biographical information again and again. It's not unusual to see paper mill and plagiarism sites near the top of a Google list. There are better articles on the internet than you would know from a quick Google search. And there is more reliable and in-depth information than unsigned Wiki entries. Literaryhistory.com catalogs signed articles, authored by specialists in literature, often originally published in peer-reviewed journals, web sites created by English faculty and special collections libraries, journalism from sources like the New York Times, The Boston Review, the UK Guardian, and Public Broadcasting, and similar high-quality literary criticism and analysis. It is worth cataloging this material. After nine years of maintaining literaryhistory.com I've learned that, contrary to fears about the lack of persistence of web links, the better material tends to remain online. Even if an article does eventually disappear from the internet, if it was a worthy article in the first place what harm is there in having a record of it? Once we put article details in the literaryhistory.com bibliography they stay in, and we just remark "removed" if the link goes dead.

As scholarly writers and critics increasingly post articles online, the quality of any internet bibliography will continue to improve. The depth of the literaryhistory.com database is due mostly to the generous contributions of scholars to the open access internet. Many scholars have uploaded their own previously published articles to their own web sites, or given permission to group sites.* Some journals have been open-handed about publishing online, and the quality media has been especially active in this. There is also a wealth of material from peer reviewed journals made available by the heavily commercial but free source, Findarticles.com. With this much good material, it's possible to at least get started with real research on the public access internet these days. I think these bibliographies prove that, and demonstrate the potential for internet bibliographies.

*For more information on how to retain your electronic rights when negotiating with publishers, consult the SPARC Author Rights Initiative

Donna Jan Pridmore is a Ph.D. candidate at the Editorial Institute at Boston University

Please email any comments to djp at bu.edu

main page | 20th century literature | 19th century literature | selection policy