Top resources for the English tripos (all links at Databases A-Z English Literature)

Databases are online, searchable collections of information. They curate resources by subject. They are useful to use alongside iDiscover and will help connect you to comprehensive and expert subject knowledge.

Cambridge Companions - offers thousands of comprehensive essays on major authors, periods and genres, written by experts. Situates writers in their literary and historical context; their major works are analysed, and their influence on later writers assessed.

Digital Theatre Plus - offers streamed films of leading British theatre productions. Each production is supported by additional content, including interviews with the creative and production teams and written study guides.

Drama Online - offers over 4,700 play texts and streaming content from partners including the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Also includes nearly 900 scholarly books and over 30 volumes of major reference works.

EEBO - Early English Books Online features digitised facsimilies of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.

ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online is a searchable database of over 180,000 books, pamphlets, essays, and broadsides published in the UK during the 18th century. 

Gale Literature Suite – a broad and comprehensive series of resources, search for authors and their works, literary movements and genres. Find full text of literary works; journal articles; literature criticism; reviews; biographical information and overviews.

JSTOR - provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, as well eBooks and primary text sources, including images via Artstor. 

National Theatre Collection - watch recordings ranging from Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to contemporary plays, comedies and musical theatre.   

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) - a searchable online edition of the OED. Useful for history of individual words, and of the English language.

Oxford Bibliographies - offers research guides on American Literature, British and Irish Literature, Victorian Literature, and Literary and Critical Theory. Features annotated bibliographies with recommendations on texts to read. Great for an introduction to new topics or authors. 

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online - offers searchable editions of primary texts. Includes editions of works by Dickens, Donne, and Dryden through to Virgil, Wordsworth and the New Oxford Shakespeare.

Oxford Very Short Introductions - useful, and easy to understand summaries of a large variety of subjects.

Proquest One Literature - includes Author Pages (with scholarly biographies, lists of works, and links to related journal articles) and online versions of reference books such as The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.