2/6/2009

Ref: CL012

June 02, 2009 - Gale, part of Cengage Learning, today announces the first release of British Literary Manuscripts Online, a completely new online library of manuscripts from many of Britain’s literary giants. Including autograph works by Pope, Johnson, Scott, Dickens, the Brontës and Wilde, the collection unites a wide range of hand-written materials - from the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Princeton University Library and the University of California among others - to offer an intimate view of the creative lives and writings of Britain’s major authors from the Restoration to the end of the Victorian era (1660 – 1900).

British Literary Manuscripts Online 1660-1900 is the first of a new manuscript series offering a unique, in-depth window into the world of creative writing.  Users can see for themselves the drafting, re-writing, sculpting and deletions which take place in the act of creating literary works, and also discover annotations or stories which writers only circulated amongst each other, providing a glimpse into the world they shared with their contemporaries.

Forming an essential basis for literary scholarly criticism, this collection offers over 400,000 pages of poems, plays, novels, private correspondence, diaries and journals, as well as drawings and handwritten notes. Notable manuscripts include numerous poems by William Blake, including The Four Zoas and several of the Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence; copies of both volumes of the Glenriddel Manuscripts, a compilation by Robert Burns of his poems and letters; a copy of Emily Brontë’s Gondal Poems with notes by Charlotte Brontë; and complete drafts of Charles Dickens’ major novels including A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.

Researchers are now able to follow a writer’s journey, identify the genesis of a famous thought, phrase or idea and gain a unique insight into the author’s creative mind and process.

An Advisory Board of scholars has contributed to the collection, defining its metadata, searchability, and display requirements. Contributors include Charlotte Cubbage, Humanities Coordinator and Selector for English, Comparative Literatures, and the Performing Arts at Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois; James L. Harner, Samuel Rhea Gammon Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A & M University and editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography; Susan Schreibman, Founding Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory, Dublin, Ireland; Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia; and Henry Woudhuysen, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University College London, England, general overseer and principal advisor to the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700.

Gale’s specially developed platform enables researchers to view manuscripts page-by-page or preview multiple pages through a thumbnail view – an impossible task when studying the physical copy. Researchers can browse by author, library or source microfilm collections and quickly search, compare and review a number of manuscripts to identify those for closer study and analysis.

Professor Woudhuysen, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University College London, comments: “What makes this project unique is the way in which collections from libraries in different parts of the world can be brought together to create an essential archive of primary source materials. The possibilities such a resource has for research and teaching are enormous and have yet to be explored fully. As a new direction in manuscript studies of all periods, Gale’s project is truly innovative.”

Jim Draper, Vice President and Publisher at Gale, comments: “Gale has long held a preeminent position in literary scholarship, with immense collections of criticism, commentary, and analysis. British Literary Manuscripts Online extends Gale’s mission by offering students and faculty a means to develop fresh new scholarship and an opportunity to compare and analyze literary works in ways never before possible.”

British Literary Manuscripts Online 1660-1900 will be followed later in 2009 by British Literary Manuscripts, Medieval and Renaissance. This will include Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from Bede and Boethius, York Mystery Plays, Chaucer and Langland writings from the Medieval period, and the writings of Sidney, Beaumont and Fletcher and Wyatt from the Renaissance. Both collections will be fully cross-searchable, contained within one intuitive, user-friendly interface.

For further information and British Literary Manuscripts Online, please contact Jim Draper, Vice President and Publisher for Gale at jim.draper@cengage.com.

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