Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide: What's the Difference?

Why another database? Everything I need, I can easily get in ABELL, MLA, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Literature Online, and Periodicals Archive Online!

Very few databases provide materials before the twenty-first century. ABELL is the only database which goes back to 1920. There are thousands of books and articles on Victorian fiction in contemporary sources from 1870 to 1920. For example, Gillian Beer has cited 45 entries on George Eliot which date back to the pre-1900 period (See Beer, George Eliot, pp. 229-240). Similarly, citing authorities on Charles Kingsley, Brenda Colloms lists 22 entries (out of 66) from 1869 to 1919 (See Colloms, Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley). In The Bronte Myth (2005), Lucasta Miller cites 58 authorities which cannot be found in any database. These are not the exceptions but the norm because, unlike in science, literary scholars must demonstrate their competence in historical and contemporary contexts. In researching on Victorian fiction, material from 1830 to 1920 is indispensable.

What's the difference between the present Victorian Database Online and Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide?

Victorian Database Online is an interdisciplinary database covering publications from 1945 to the present on the Arts, Sciences and Social Sciences. It includes Victorian fiction under Literature but does not include primary materials, editions and contemporary criticisms published in the nineteenth century and up to 1945.

Information on Victorian fiction published from 1945 onward may be available in both databases. But the entries in Victorian Database Online are not annotated and there is no indication whether an article or a review citation of a book is from a peer-reviewed journal or not.

Both databases allow saving and printing of search results without limit. But in Victorian Fiction: An Online Research Guide, one can limit search results to recommended and pre-selected items and as such eliminate non-essential materials.

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