About LiteraryHistory.com

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Because the public deserves better information

This web site is a free, public service reference site for literary criticism that I've maintained since 1998. I've spent many years of my life as a graduate student in English literature, though I didn't complete my Ph.D. (not yet anyway, I'm all-but-dissertation for my Ph.D., with about 3/4's of a dissertation written, but it will probably never be completed). Maybe being an independent scholar has made me particularly sensitive to the problem of so much commercially motivated junk about literature on the internet, and the big difference between that and reliable literary commentary and analysis.

All kinds of writing can be found on the web, but students can't necessarily rely on a Google search to find the good stuff. The goal of literaryhistory.com has always been to screen open-access literary criticism and recommend the credible material. We take no advertising from publishers or distributors, nor do we pay Google for any advertising. When I started this site I hoped, as I still do, that cataloging the best web materials on literature would help students and readers in their research. And I hoped a site like this would encourage other academic authorities to make their writings available online and open-access, and so enrich the internet for others. As time has passed this site has grown, and now includes individual web pages on about 250 canonical writers in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. All the articles and books on literaryhistory.com pages were written and placed online (legally, not in violation of copyright) by others. My editorial function is limited to selecting reliable material and writing annotations.

Literaryhistory.com does not have an advisory committee, nor is it sponsored by a university, English department, or scholarly society. I wish we were. But we have benefited from the advice and corrections, and the occasional hostility, of many scholars, too numerous to thank individually here. For fourteen years literaryhistory.com has been highly regarded by students, teachers, and librarians, collected by academic libraries and recommended on the web sites of college professors. From those sources readers continue to find out about literaryhistory.com, even as Google becomes more and more commercial.

The site is aimed at an audience of college students, graduate students, college graduates, high school teachers, and curious readers the world over who want to study the major works of nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature. It will be of use, in a pinch, to advanced scholars. For serious academic research no open-access internet resource can compare to the proprietary materials available through a university library, available only to the "university community" by password. However, almost all college students lose their library passwords when they graduate, at which time they join the ranks of high school teachers and the rest of us who must fend for ourselves in the world of open-access internet.

It's well known that many college students use the internet rather than their college library to research topics for their English classes. And an even larger audience of readers of English and American literature doesn't have the opportunity to use an academic research library and lacks the expensive, library-issued passwords needed to access proprietary online materials. For various reasons, many people who wouldn't 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 experience by not going to the library, 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 there needs to be better information on the internet, and there also has to be a better way of finding the credible information that does exist. Web search engines, no matter how refined their algorithms, don't 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.

We challenge all this web site's users, but especially the teachers, professors, and librarians to compare our links on any author with the results of a Google search on the same author. The sites at the top of a Google list are mostly ones that are associated with Google itself, or have something to sell, or are simultaneously advertising with Google. Many of those sites tell you little or nothing about who publishes them, who makes decisions about content and quality, or what their standards are. Sometimes even paper mill and plagiarism sites show up near the top of a Google list. There is better material on the internet than you would know from a quick Google search. An example of Google-logic: for at least the past two years the web site "FannyBurney.com" has ranked number 2 on a Google search for the eighteenth-century novelist Fanny Burney (number 1 is of course Wiki). The anonymous fan who is the author of FannyBurney.com begins by telling us that hers is better than what could be there: "Welcome to FannyBurney.com. I bought this domain in order to prevent it from becoming one of those 'ad sites', in the hope that Fanny Burney's popularity will continue to grow. My plan is to create a proper tribute to Fanny Burney, but until then I hope you enjoy reading these articles discussing both she [sic] and Jane Austen." Google thinks the site is authoritative because the url is "fannyburney.com." But anybody can buy a site name, as long as it isn't taken yet. I wish scholarly journals and English departments would start registering urls of author names and buying them--it's quite inexpensive to do this.

At literaryhistory.com we catalog signed articles, authored by specialists in literature, often published in peer-reviewed journals, web sites created by English faculty, articles published at scholarly societies, research libraries, and similar high-quality literary criticism and analysis, and some top-flight journalism from sources like the UK Guardian and Public Broadcasting. We exclude the commercial, the ungrammatical, the anonymous, the illegal, and we do everything we can, short of peer review, to weed out the unreliable. There is much to be found on the internet that's solid, authoritative, and worth cataloging, as these pages demonstrate.

LiteraryHistory.com and Copyright

All of the articles indexed at literaryhistory.com have been placed online by other parties. We make every effort to avoid linking to material that may be posted in violation of copyright. We do not link to web sites that do not make clear who edits and publishes the site.

In 1998, before the first edition of literaryhistory.com appeared online, I consulted a copyright lawyer. The attorney advised me that linking is permitted under the fair use provision, as long as literaryhistory.com was not making a profit from other people's work. Even so, in the early years of literaryhistory.com I always let other webmasters know when I had linked to their sites and informed them that I would be happy to remove the link if they objected. For the most part, my emails to webmasters were ignored, or if answered, they wearily replied in words to the effect of "of course you can link to our site, you don't need to ask."

Jan Pridmore
Editor and Publisher
LiteraryHistory.com

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