Significant features at a Glance:

Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide is an ongoing project on publications on Victorian fiction. Although it includes each and every publication on Victorian Fiction from 1830 to the present, currently it is primarily focused on guide to materials on fifty-one major, minor and underread novelists. 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.

Litir (Literary Information and Retrieval) Database has a long and proud history of helping researchers around the world locate information on the Victorian period. In 1986, Patrick Leary was among the first to recognize the "immense usefulness" of Victorian Database, in a review in Victorians Institute Journal. In 1997, Isobel Armstrong, Professor of English, Birkbeck College, hailed it as "Victorian splendour brought up-to-date" in the Times Higher Education Supplement; and R. Hanson "highly recommended" it for "undergraduates and above" in Choice. Subsequently, Choice recognized the database as one of the "best of the best", awarding it an Outstanding Academic Achievement for 1997. In 2000, Victorian Database Online was acclaimed as "an elegant and powerful web site for researchers on all aspects of British Victorian studies."

Incorporating years of experience in database management, Litir is now delighted to launch Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide, a comprehensive, exhaustive and indispensable guide to material 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.

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

© 2008. Updated: May 2008
Web Development: Norm Friesen
Editor: Brahma Chaudhuri