A Literary Index provides both an overview and a review of the more significant collections of Internet literary resources of interest to scholars, students, and lovers of literature.  This site is not intended to be an exhaustive index of all literary resources; rather it functions both as a descriptive meta-index to all things literary and as a review of the most important lists of literary resources and collections of literary links that proliferate on the Internet.  In that capacity, I hope that it is of service to you.   If you know of other literary indices that you think should be included here, please don't hesitate to let me know and I will try to review them.

Chris_Flack@Bigfoot.com

• Descriptions at Yahoo's Literature pages, Yahoo's indices of literary materials are cryptic and short.   Among the categories that Yahoo currently tracks (and it keeps adding new ones!) are: Authors, Awards, Classics, Countries, Cultures, and Groups, Criticism and Theory, Electronic Literature, Events, Genres, Institutes, Journals, Magazines, Mailing Lists, Organizations, Scripts, Storytelling and Writing.
• "The English Server co-operative, managed by graduate students, faculty and staff in the English Department at Carnegie-Mellon University" is one of the oldest and most extensive collections of electronic resources for those interested in literature.
• American and English Literature Internet Resources, compiled by Winnie Shyam of the Buley Library, is both an eclectic and useful listing of resources.  
• English Network Resources is a reasonably comprehensive index of literary resources.
• The Names Index is an extensive and well-laid out attempt to index all the different authors sites that fans have developed.   The Index can take a long time to load due to the length of the pages.  

• Jack Lynch's Literary Resources on the Net which points to "sites on the Internet dealing with English and American literature, excluding single electronic texts, and is limited to collections of information useful to literary critics" is easily the most complete and logically organized attempt to fully categorize all scholarly literary resources.   Literary Resources on the Net is grouped into sixteen main categories; Classical & Biblical, Medieval, Renaissance, Eighteenth-Century, Romantic, Victorian British, Twentieth-Century British and Irish, American, Theatre and Drama, Theory, Women's Literature & Feminism, Ethnic Nationalities, Other National Literatures, Bibliography & History of the Book, Hypertext, and Miscellaneous.   Unfortunately, there's not much description of indexed sites; the format here is mainly of a list.   However, the entire resources list is search able.
• The English Literature section of Voice of the Shuttle, an index for the Humanities maintained by Alan Liu, a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara is a great place to begin research from.   Resources are organized by academic specialties, primarily literary periods.   The major categories indexed are Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Renaissance, 17th Century, Restoration , 18th Century, Romantics, Victorian, Modern, Contemporary, Minority, American and Other languages in English.
• Literary Mailing Lists at the University of Pennsylvania maintains subscription instructions for most literary mailing lists on the Net.   In addition, Bookwire also keeps a good Mailing List Index where you can learn how to subscribe to mailing lists containing literary discussion.  
• The Call For Papers archive, also at Penn, indexes recent calls for scholarly papers by journals and conferences.  You can also join the related mailing-list if you'd like.

• Tom Goldpaugh's English and Humanities Departments Online, kept at Marist University, is an annotated list of most online English departments of the U.S.  and Canada.   Annotations are brief, generally no more than a few sentences or so.   The list is split into two pages: A - O and P - Z.
• A massive list of English Departments WorldWide, over 300 English Department Homepages, "ranging from the dull to inspired and from almost empty to extraordinarily full" is maintained by David Hoover at New York University.   Entries are not annotated but are listed alphabetically.
• The alphabetically listed 100 English Department Home Pages at Rutgers University includes "the home pages of "major" departments at private universities, a representation of smaller liberal arts colleges with a strong tradition of literary study, and the main campuses of state universities." Included are departments that haven't yet done the cyberspace shuffle.
• A good number of the English Departments on the Net are also listed here at Voice of the Shuttle's Listing of English Departments.   Voice of the Shuttle's listings are not restricted to English departments within the United States and includes a few European and Asian sites.   Lists are the rule here.
• Yahoo's List of Literary Institutes is simply a list of a number of English Departments and literary institutes, arranged in alphabetical order.   Brief descriptions are occasionally included, apparently at the whim of the person who submitted the URL to Yahoo.
• Finally, American Universities is a Listing of all of the American Universities on the Web that is regularly updated.  
If you don't find the English department listed in the above indexes, and it's not here either, then chances are that the institution it's associated with has not gone online yet.
• Other institutes of interest to those investigating the study of literature include the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities.  

• Alex: A Catalog of Electronic Texts on the Internet that indexed about 2000 entries "was an informal research project whose purpose was to explore the possibilities of creating catalogs of Internet-based electronic texts." Unfortunately, due to funding difficulties, it's no longer being maintained.
• The Public Online Texts collection at the Reading Room of the Internet Public Library contains "over 3700 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Subject Classification" as well as by keyword.  
• By its own admission, Books On-line indexes more than 2500 electronic works in English.   In addition, this main page contains a list of the most important repositories of online texts, both in English and in other languages.  
• The Reading Room at Bookwire indexes a significant number of electronic texts and provides links to related resources.
• Electronic Texts is an index of the major locations of electronic texts maintained by Jack Lynch as part of his Literary Resources pages.   The listing, however, is seldom updated.
• The English Collection of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia offers an ongoing and exhaustive digitizing of a number of public-domain electronic texts.  Many of these texts are available for viewing by visitors though a number are restricted to students, faculty, and staff at the University.   If you're looking to see if you can grab an electronic version of a public-domain text, then this is the place to visit first.   Texts are organized by author.
• Highlights of The Tech Archive at MIT include The Internet Classics Archive, a searchable archive of 375 classical Greek and Roman texts (in English translation), and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.  
• The main focus of Columbia University's Project Bartleby is poetry.   The collection includes electronic copies of the work of many major English poets.

• Bookwire bills itself as "the first place to Look for Book Information on the World Wide Web." Among its many features are a Main index that includes categorized listings for booksellers, publishers, libraries and other resources.   The entire site is searchable.   There's also a Best Bet's section.
• Wired's Books Index is a reasonably good list, which has the added advantage of allowing you to search a number of book-related databases, including The Library Of Congress. This page also includes links to the major online booksellers, Amazon.Com and Barnes & Noble.
• Interloc claims to have a searchable index of over 3 million used and rare books for purchase. If you're trying to track down an out-of-print text, this is the place to go.
• Acqweb, a resource for librarians looking for help in making purchases, also keeps a very extensive and full list of publishers around the world, commercial, academic, and specialty.
• The Association of American University Presses's site at Princeton University maintains an index of recent scholarly publications that can be easily browsed by visitors.  A copy of the index can be found at the University of Chicago.

• Teaching with Excellence at the University of California, Berkeley offers extensive exercises and resources for writing instructors wishing to evaluate their performance as a teacher of rhetoric and language.
• Rhetoric and Composition Resources were put together for an English class in Rhetoric and contains a lengthy list of resources for those interested in rhetoric and composition.  It is, however, only a list -- no descriptions of the indexed sites are included -- and it's purview is very broad (both English departments and commercial magazines are indexed).  
• The University of Victoria Writer's Guide is a hypertext project that guides students, and others, through the process of writing from start to finish.  
• Jack Lynch's Resources for Writers and Writing Instructors is part of his Literary Resources pages.   There's a number of important links here, many to on-line grammar and style guides, including his own.
• And there's always Yahoo's Writing Index.

• A number of English courses are indexed by the English Division of The World Lecture Hall: English at the University of Texas, Austin which is attempting to collate all electronic syllabi in literature.   Short descriptions are given of each class that indicate subject, and the degree of its investment in the Web.   This index is regularly updated.
• Literature Course Syllabi at the University of Pennsylvania, the site of an excellent English department web-site, keeps track of the ever-expanding number of hypertext literature course syllabi.  However, he only keeps track of syllabi that use hypertext in a "significant way"; he insists that the syllabi "make real use of the web." Unfortunately, this list is neither long nor regularly updated.
• Teaching American Literature is maintained by Randy Bass, and functions as material to aid in teaching from the Heath Anthology of American Literature and also as an archive to the T-AMLIT mailing list.  As a result, it has a strong multiculturalist bent.   In addition, it's not very deep in the number of materials included.