The Literary Encyclopedia is edited by a distinguished international board and owned collectively by its editors and writers. It is one of very few major publications in the world not owned by a corporation or major public institution.

The vast majority of our contributors are practising academics who teach the subjects they write about in universities across the world. Contributors are invited to contribute by our editors, and when each entry is written it is reviewed by the relevant members of our editorial board before being published. We also have a small number of independent scholars writing for the Encyclopedia who are not currently affiliated to a particular institution but whose publications and experience amply qualify them to write on the subject in hand. A small number of our contributors are research students nearing the end of their research periond whose work is strongly recommended and reviewed by their supervisors. The Literary Encyclopedia is emphatically not an amateur resource and we do not publish work by unqualified writers.

If you would like to write an entry for the Encyclopedia, please send your short-form CV (including publications record) and a writing sample to submissions@litencyc.com for consideration by our editorial board. Although the majority of our contributors are academics, we also welcome applications from teachers, members of learned societies, independent scholars and professional writers.

We only accept a limited number of postgraduates as contributors to the Encyclopedia. If you are a research student who would like to write for us, please supply the name of your PhD supervisor or their email address so that we can request their opinion.

We do not accept undergraduate students as contributors to the Encyclopedia. No disrespect intended, but as with most arts, it takes time to perfect the skills.

Individual pages in the Encyclopedia are organised with UIDs (Unique Identifiers). These are stable and you can use the URLs as they appear in the browser window to link to individual pages e.g.

<a href=/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5160> Louis Potter: William Shakespeare in <em>The Literary Encyclopedia</em></a>.

To link to the Literary Encyclopedia homepage, insert the html <a href=http://www.litencyc.com> The Literary Encyclopedia</A> into your code.

For information about reproducing content from the Encyclopedia, please click here

The Literary Encyclopedia links database is a searchable database of sites recommended by our contributors and readers and indexed by our editorial team. Appropriate links from the database appear when you click the “Internet Resources” button at the head of an Encyclopedia entry. Members can also search the entire database by date, place and resource type.

If you run a website relevant to any of our entries, and it is not yet listed, please feel free to bring your site to our attention using the contact form. We will invite our relevant expert to advise us on making a link.

At the base of each entry you will find a citation which gives author, title, publication date and internet address. These citations can be copied directly into your bibliography.

Because all of our entries are written and edited by professional scholars and writers who are respected as experts in their field, they are an appropriate resource to quote and cite, as opposed to other resources where authorship and provenance may not be clear, and wiki-based resources where the writing may well have been produced by people who lack first-hand knowledge of the material and are merely quoting the words of others.

Our records are indexed and organised into three databases, covering People, Works and Topics & Events. By using the advanced search function, readers can list writers according to genre, sex, period and culture, making it possible in a few seconds to see, for example, which women writers of poetry in English were flourishing in the world between 1910 and 1920. Because all our records are given a detailed index, readers will be able to organise The Literary Encyclopedia to show, for example, lists of gothic novels or science fiction novels or tragic drama or travel writings, and restrict this subset by date of publication or sex or country of author. The Literary Encyclopedia therefore makes it possible to view literary history in ways which were previously possible only through arduous research.

It is free to read basic records and the first 400 or so words of published entries on People, Works and Topics. You can read a list of Contents here or read about looking for a particular entry on a Person, Work or Topic by clicking on the questions below.

As well as our entries, the Encyclopedia also incorporates a Links database, Stylebook and Glossary, and offers various research tools. For more information see: What are the other research tools available on the Literary Encyclopedia?

Because multiple indexing values are used by our databases, you may find that a writer you think of as an English novelist might appear on this list.

For People entries:
Activity = What a person does (e.g. Novelist, Playwright, Historian).
Domain = The general field in which they work (e.g. Science, Journalism, Literature)

For Works entries:
Genre = What type of work it is (e.g. Novel, Tragedy, Pamphlet)
Domain = The general field which the work is part of (e.g. Religion, Theatre, Literature)

For Topics entries:
Kind = What sort of Topic it is (e.g. Battle, Theory, Method)
Domain = The general field which the Topic is part of (e.g. Cinema, Industry, Social Life)

Entries are also indexed by date and place so you can search for people writing at a certain time, books published in a certain country etc.

Please see How do I find a Person? and follow the instructions for using the advanced search.

First go to the record for the person, then click the “Works by…” link at the head or foot of the entry.

You can use the advanced search to look for people, works and events linked to a particular country.
Note: To use the Advanced search feature you must be a paying member of the Encyclopedia.

The Bookshelf function allows users to save entries to a personal bookshelf, which can be accessed through their member homepage. You can put together a collection of entries that you might want to refer back to for a particular essay or project, compile reading lists for a class or book group, or simply save collections of your favourite books and authors. Once you have compiled a bookshelf you can email the link to it to a friend, group or class.

This function is only available to paying members of the Encyclopedia. You must log in in order to set up your Bookshelf.

When you log into your member homepage, you can click on “View Bookshelves”. If you have not set up any shelves yet, you will see your default shelf only. To add a new shelf, type in a name for the shelf - for example, Women Writers or My Favourite Books, and click on Create. Please do not include apostrophes, speech marks etc in your shelf name.

To add entries to your bookshelves, click on the small “Add to your Bookshelf” logo at the top right-hand corner of the entry you are reading. A pop-up window will open, and you can select what to call the entry and which shelf to save it on.

You might wish to add a description to your Bookshelf, especially if you are planning on sending it to other people. To do so, click on the Open button next to the Bookshelf you want to change, and then click Edit Description. Once you have typed in your new description click on Save.

To send your bookshelf to someone else, click on the Open button next to the Bookshelf you want to send to them, type in their email address and click Send. If you want to send the bookshelf to several different people you might find it quicker to email the bookshelf to yourself and then forward on the link to your class or group using your own email program.

The default for Bookshelves is set to “Private”. This means the only people who can see them are you yourself, and anyone to whom you send a link. If you change “Private” to “Public” the Bookshelf will become visible to anyone who clicks on the Bookshelf link on the menu bar. The advantage of making a Bookshelf public is that it enables other people to copy the Bookshelf to their own folders, rename the Bookshelf, edit its description, and delete and add articles. This feature is designed to enable teachers and seminar leaders to save each other time in setting up complex lists.

Online research can be a time-consuming and difficult process, and repeatedly sifting through search-engine results that turn out to be irrelevant or unsuitable can be extremely frustrating. The Literary Enyclopedia Links Database includes useful sites that have been individually selected by our contributors and editors, and then indexed according to their content to help you find the quality resources you need.

You can search the Database in various different ways. To search for a website about a particular person, work or topic, you can click on the Links button at the top and base of the relevant entry. This will give you a list of sites specifically about that person, work or topic.

To search for a website which covers various authors of a particular period or place (e.g. Romantic authors, French authors between 1800 and 1850) or that cover a particular kind of writing / area of interest (e.g. religious authors, military history, visual arts) then you can search the Literary Encyclopedia Links Database for all links which contain information on all authors, works or topics which fall between the parameters you set.

To use the Literary Encyclopedia Links Database, you must be a paying member of the Encyclopedia.

This function is still being developed. We will soon be expanding the search criteria to allow users to find websites according to their content - e.g. to find all sites which have interviews with authors, etexts, bibliographies etc.

Please note that whilst building this database, we have checked every site as thoroughly as possible to ensure that they do not contain or link to articles of an offensive nature (e.g. pornographic, racist, homophobic or antisemitic material). However, the Literary Encyclopedia cannot be held responsible for the content of any of the sites included in the database. If you feel that any of the sites in the Database are unsuitable for inclusion, please use the Contact form to let us know, so that we can re-assess them. Please mark your subject message “Unsuitable Link”.

For information on adding your website to the Literary Encyclopedia Links Database, please see How do I add a link from The Literary Encyclopedia to my own website?

At the top and base of entries, you will find links to various features.

The following tools and features are free and can be used by members and non-members:

This searches across all three databases so your results list includes People profiles, Works entries and Topics entries. It only includes records for which we have published a full entry. For more information see What’s the difference between Anywhere, the Simple Search and the Advanced Search??

This tool searches for all People, Works and Topics in the same time period, domain and location as the subject of the entry you are reading, thus providing an instant contextual overview. Find out who else was writing, what else was being published, and what events were taking place!

English Style Book

The English Style Book provides basic information for undergraduate students in the humanities but it is a helpful resource for anybody writing an essay. Providing instruction on citations, laying out a bibliography, rules of grammar and punctuation, and various examples from real essays, the English Style Book will help you avoid the most common pitfalls.

Glossary

This glossary provides a quick check-list of common poetic terms. The same or more extended entries can be found in the Topics table of The Literary Encyclopedia. Other terms not included in this list may also be found in our Topics database.

Works By...

This function opens a list of works by an author.

See also: How do I search for works by a particular person?

This link takes you from a Works entry to the People entry of its author.

University English

The Literary Encyclopedia is closely linked to its companion site www.University-English.com which provides contact information for the global profession of higher education English studies. Specifically, University-English offers databases of English departments, Journals, Associations and Publishers, enabling users to move directly to the relevant homepage and subordinate pages of websites, and to search list by sophisticated indexing procedures. Our aim is to enable us all to find exactly what we need much more directly and efficiently; whereas a generic search engine might lead you to a university homepage, our database takes you straight to the departmental pages. University-English also provides dynamic lists of jobs and conferences around the world.

“New Books” links to the data table which list those scholarly books which publishers pay to advertise with us (books which you will see appearing on the right hand margin from time time. You can use this interface to construct advanced searches for books by or about an author, or by period and geography, and so on.

See also: Can I add my book to the New Books list?

See the section on our New Books in What are the other research tools available in The Literary Encyclopedia?.

This can happen if you have opened a page, then logged in, then tried to print the entry. Since the page has already been downloaded to your computer before you logged in, the page does not know you are logged in. Please close the page and repeat the find and all will work well. It is good practice to log in as soon as you come to the site so as to avoid this problem.

All contributors to the Encyclopedia are entitled to free membership. Use the Contact form to contact staff and they will enable access.

Once you've hit Search and come up with a long list of results to explore, you don't want to have to re-calibrate the Advanced search all over again in between sessions. Just click 'Save This Search' at the top of your results and you can give your search a name (e.g. "Novel 1950-2000 Search" or "My Canadian Theatre Search" and add it to one of your Bookshelves.
For more information, see also: Bookshelves

The first 400 words of each entry are available to read for free. You can also look up People, Topics and Works using the Simple Search without charge, so you can find out whether we have published a full entry on what you are looking for before you decide to sign up. To read the full text of longer entries, you must be logged in as a paying member.

If you have already set up a membership, remember to log in and out at the start and end of every session.

The timeline function enables you to set up parallel searches for works and topics & events. Fist click the timeline option on the menu bar, then set the general intellectual domain or the genre of works you wish to see listed, then set the date range, then the region or specific country. On the right hand side, set the criteria for the kind of topics or events you wish to array. When you click on "search" you will see a chronological list showing the information you wish.

Saving timelines to bookshelves is enabled for paid-up memnbers (or members of institutions who subscribe on their behalf). It is best first to login, then to open your personal account, then go to "Make and View Bookshelves". Set up a bookshelf with the appropriate name. Then make your timeline and when you are happy with it, click "Save" in the timeline screen. You will then be given a list of your bookshelves and can select the one where you wish to save it.