WORLD LITERATURE SERIES
Alexander Street’s World Literature Series brings together hundreds of thousands of pages of
poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, plays, and essays representing the world’s vast diversity
of culture, geography, ethnicity, gender, and viewpoint. The works celebrate the creative
achievements of authors from around the globe, including the broad literary output of Africa and
its diaspora, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and other regions—as well as the North
American expressions of this rich world heritage.
Massive and continually growing, the series presents the literatures of place, gender, and race,
full of sociological and historical significance. Students and scholars of history, politics,
transatlantic studies, postcolonial studies, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, and other
areas can now explore these important literary works in new ways.
EDITORIAL STANDARDS
Each database in the World Literature Series delivers:
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The definitive electronic space for the study of its specific literary area.
Online collected editions of authors, including early, rare, hard to access, or previously
unpublished works. In most instances, these are the only collected editions available in
any format.
Access to largely unstudied writers and to works whose reputations have yet to transcend
the specific literature, because only selections have been published in the occasional
anthology.
New online tools, for research and exploring in ways never before possible.
Overall, more than 75% of the works within the World Literature Series are otherwise
inaccessible, previously unpublished, or in-copyright (not free on the Web). Under the guidance of
some of the world’s leading faculty advisors, who help to select the content and write introductory
and contextual commentaries, the databases meet the strictest scholarly standards.
DEFINITIVE DIGITAL EDITIONS AND MORE
Access to rare and previously unpublished material is only the beginning of the value in the World
Literature Series. Each text is re-keyed to 99.95% accuracy to ensure that text searching is
thorough and precise. Exceptionally detailed indexing—to the level of each poem, scene, and
work—allows users to explore and analyze the content in ways that are simply impossible in
paper form. For example:
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Find 100 scenes on the topic of funerals within 1,200 plays written by African Americans.
Analyze how the occurrence of the words spider or Anansi have evolved over time within
the tropes in Caribbean myth.
Compare how poems from Chilean authors and those from Cuban writers address
politics or political as subject.
Examine how Derek Walcott treats themes of loneliness across his plays and fiction.
There is also rich, supplementary material to inform the texts. For example, American Indian
Drama includes a full run of the Native American Playwrights Newsletter, a publication vital to
scholarship that exists in only a handful of libraries. In Latino Literature are previously
unpublished, live audio recordings of early Chicano theatre companies such as Teatro Espíritu de
Aztlán and Teatro Mestizo. Scottish Women Poets includes essays by leading academics
explaining the significance of the materials.
WHAT’S IN THIS GROWING SERIES TODAY?
Subscribers to the World Literature Series will find the following collections here today:
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African, African diaspora, and African American—Black Drama, Black Short Fiction,
Black Women Writers, and Caribbean Literature
Latin American and Latino—Latino Literature and Latin American Women Writers
Women’s—Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, Irish Women Poets of the
Romantic Period, Black Women Writers, Latin American Women Writers, and North
American Women's Drama
American—American Film Scripts and Twentieth Century North American Drama
Postcolonial—Caribbean Literature and South and Southeast Asian Literature in English
North American Indian—North American Indian Drama
Today, there are nearly 220,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, and novels, along with 5,000 plays
and film scripts in full text. These numbers will grow to 660,000 pages of poetry and prose plus
more than 6,000 plays and scripts from the current collections. We will add additional new
collections every year, growing both the quantity of content and the range of diverse topics and
genres. At least 5,000 pages of new content go live every two weeks, so that users watch the
series grow before their eyes. RSS feeds and other forms of notification keep people informed
about the updates.