Alexander Street Literature

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Alexander Street Literature brings together the hundreds of thousands of pages of poetry, short stories, novels, and non-fiction in 8 Alexander Street individual literature collections, cross-searchable through a new interface.

Filling a gaping hole in your collection

This is the literature you don’t have in your library through other online resources—in copyright, contemporary, global, and diverse.  Rich in sociological and historical significance, Alexander Street Literature delivers the literatures of place, gender, and race. With new content added on a regular basis, the current package will grow to more than 600,000 pages of poetry and prose.  Students and scholars of literature, history, diversity studies, politics, transatlantic studies, postcolonial history, geography, cultural studies, and anthropology can now explore these important works that have previously not been available.

Vast and continuously growing, Alexander Street Literature celebrates the creative achievements of authors from around the globe, including the broad literary output of Africa and its diaspora, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and other regions—along with the North American expressions of this rich world heritage.  Included is all the content in these Alexander Street collections: Latino Literature; Latin American Women Writers; Black Women Writers; Black Short Fiction and Folklore; South and Southeast Asian Literature; Caribbean Literature; Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period; and Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period. Additional collections may be added over time.

EDITORIAL STANDARDS

Under the guidance of some of the world’s leading faculty advisors, who help to select the content and write introductory and contextual commentaries, these collections meet the strictest scholarly standards.

Alexander Street Literature brings your faculty and students:

• The definitive electronic space for the study of each specific literary area—crafted collections compiled by expert editors.

• The online “complete collected editions” of authors—including their early, rare, hard to access, or previously unpublished works. In most instances, these are the only collected editions available in any format.

• Access to important writers who have remained largely unstudied because only selected works have been published in the occasional anthology.  Now, these authors and their complete works can either renter or newly enter the canon.

• Alexander Street’s famous Semantic Indexing™ and uniquely powerful search capabilities, allowing users to make new discoveries and experience the literature in ways never before possible.

Well more than half of the works within Alexander Street Literature are otherwise inaccessible, previously unpublished, or in copyright. These works are not free on the Web, and in many instances not available anywhere in any format.

DEFINITIVE DIGITAL EDITIONS AND MORE

Access to rare and previously unpublished material is only the beginning of the value in Alexander Street Literature. Each text is re-keyed to 99.95% accuracy to ensure that searching is thorough and precise. Exceptionally detailed indexing allows users to explore and analyze the content in ways that are simply impossible in paper form. For example:

• 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 fiction.

There is also rich, supplementary material to inform the texts. For example, Scottish Women Poets and Irish Women Poets include essays by leading academics explaining the significance of the materials.  In Black Short Fiction and Folklore, you can hear streaming audio recordings of Haya balladry and folktales, the original text simultaneously scrolling with their English-language transcriptions, allowing users to experience Haya oral tradition in new ways.

WHAT’S IN THIS PACKAGE TODAY?

Subscribers to Alexander Street Literature have access to the following collections:

• Black Short Fiction and Folklore

• Black Women Writers

• Caribbean Literature

• South and Southeast Asian Literature in English

• Latin American Women Writers

• Latino Literature

• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period

• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period

These collections deliver hundreds of thousands of pages of poetry, short fiction, essays, and novels. As the collections continue to grow, Alexander Street Literature will reach nearly 660,000 pages soon, and additional titles may be added.

SUBSCRIPTION AND PURCHASE OPTIONS

Alexander Street Literature is available by annual subscription, with prices scaled to library budget. If your institution has already purchased perpetual rights to some of the individual collections that make up Alexander Street Literature, the subscription price to Alexander Street Literature is reduced proportionately. A library that owns all of the individual collections pays nothing at all for Alexander Street Literature.

If you are interested in a one-time purchase of perpetual rights of the individual collections, we offer special rates—with our largest discounts to libraries that purchase all of the collections. Please contact us for details.

For free trail and pricing information, contact us at sales@alexanderstreet.com.