Announcing the first online reference work in this field

Victorian Fiction:
An Online Research Guide

A Comprehensive, Exhaustive & Indispensable Online Annotated Guide to Research on Publications on Victorian Fiction from 1830 to the present

The Victorian Fiction boom that started about fifty years ago has led to widespread study of the Victorian novel in every high school, college, and university course in English. Authors whose texts are invariably studied include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Gissing, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, H. G. Wells, and many more. The advent of the World Wide Web has accelerated scholarly and popular interest in Victorian fiction and has revolutionized all aspects of the academic process. Students today do almost everything related to their studies online - time-tables, registration, communication with their instructors, submission of term papers, finding grades from college premises or from home, and above all, researching term papers and preparing for seminars and exams.

Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide is designed as a response to this growing need for an online resource where students can find research information on Victorian novelists easily and instantly.

This online project relies on and is heavily indebted to earlier bibliographies and guides, particularly Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research, edited by Lionel Stevenson (1964) and Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, edited by George H. Ford (1978), and The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 4, 1800-1900, Third Edition, edited by Joanne Shattock (1999). The project recognises the need for an electronic resource to tackle "the vast flood of materials" that have appeared since 1978. The first Guide covered eleven authors; the coverage of the second Guide was enlarged to include seventeen. Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide currently offers, as listed on Primary Authors, comprehensive coverage of fifty-one novelists, from the major authors of the period to lesser-known writers such as Marie Corelli, Sarah Grand, Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, and many others.

Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide is an ongoing project. Currently, it comprises more than 35,000 entries on books, articles, and dissertation abstracts on the fifty-one novelists covered, with selective annotated entries, mostly extracts from book reviews in refereed journals, and authors' own theses in refereed articles. In addition, linked subject words and phrases in each entry allow for easy cross-referencing capability. The database includes editions of primary works published from 1830 onward, contemporary reviews and critical works published from the nineteenth century to the present, and information on manuscript holdings. Annotations are provided, at least for now, only to those entries considered essential readings, though the goal is to annotate, within a year, each and every entry in the database.

The remaining 129 novelists out of 180 listed in Joanne Shattock's The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature will be covered in about two years.

Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide combines the power of the "scholar-critic" to select what is essential and the power of the Internet to search almost everything written on a subject. We hope that this resource, like its predecessor, Victorian Database Online, will serve the needs of researchers, faculty, and students at all levels.

Try it free at www.victorianfiction.com

© 2007. Updated: October 2007
Web Development: Norm Friesen
Editor: Brahma Chaudhuri