Library Guides: English Literature: Modern and Contemporary: Find Primary & Literary Works

Finding Books in the MU Libraries.

Looking for a specific book? Use the Book Finder to quickly search MERLIN, MOBIUS and beyond.

Use the Location Guide to find which call numbers are on which floor.

Or map the location of your call number.

Library Catalogs

To find a specific work, search by title. Note: sometimes we have the collected works of an author, but the individual titles are not listed. To find works by an author, do an author search, last name first.

WorldCat
Date Coverage: Before 1000 BC-date

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Center for Research Libraries Catalog
COPAC
Daniel Boone Regional Library
The catalog for Columbia's local library. They may also have books relevant to your research, but will be especially strong in having the literary works themselves.

Books Online

Online text collections deliver more detailed results than the library catalogs.

Literature Online Text Collection
Full text of more than 350,000 selected works of poetry, drama and prose in English from the eighth century to the present. Allows the definition of searchable collections by nationality, gender, individual authors, etc.
Google Book Search
Google Books allows you to search within the full-text of over 20 million digitized books. You can only read the full-text of books that are out of copyright, but it can help you find books on your topic or find out more about a particular book.
Hathi Trust
Hathi Trust allows you to search the full-text of over 10 million digitized volumes, many of which are in the public domain and can be accessed in their entirety.
Internet Archive Text Collection
The Internet Archive allows you to find and download a variety of books and texts, including fiction, historical texts, and academic books.
Online Books Page (UPenn)
The Online Books Page provides access to digital versions of books, primarily through linking out to various other sources (including, but not limited to Hathi Trust and Project Gutenberg) where you can find the text.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg provides access to thousands of ebooks that can be downloaded in various formats or read online. They are better for classics than for recent works, but it may be useful.

Newspapers

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times
Cover-to-cover digital reproductions of every issue (1851-2020). Full page-image and full-text searching.
Date Coverage: 1851-varies

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Internet Public Library Newspaper Collection
Links to newspaper websites, arranged geographically. Many of these have online archives, which provide citations to articles, if not the full text. Articles may be found in the MU microfilm collection or obtained via ILL@MU.
Special Collections Newspapers on Microfilm
Lists of newspapers available in Ellis Library, arranged alphabetically, geographically, and chronologically.