The University of Virginia's Electronic Text
Center provides access to some full text documents and allows searching
of a variety of texts.
British
Poetry 1780-1910: A Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions at UVa
John Keats,
The Poetical Works. 1884. from Columbia
Some
other searchable full text databases include
- Full text of Shakespeare's plays by highlighting 'Shakespeare's plays', hitting ENTER, and entering a search term.
- Occurrences of words in the Bible (KJV) by
highlighting 'the
Bible (KJV)', hitting ENTER, and typing a word as a search string.
- Search a fulltext
poetry database in the same way.
- Leeds Database of Manuscript English Verse
- And here are some
others, via UPenn. Searches may be quite slow. Note
also that a result "Select one of:" with no choices means that the term
you searched was not found ['heart' is not in Chaucer, but 'ywis' is].
In each case a successful search will return a list of items; use arrow
keys or TAB key to move the highlight to an item you wish to retrieve and
hit ENTER to see the passage containing your search word. Use the u
key or the LEFT ARROW key to move back to the list of items.
- John Milton's Paradise
Lost and Paradise Regained are available in full text, chapter by chapter. It is possible to search each chapter using the / key (a UNIX 'search' command), but you must proceed one
search at a time until the 'pattern not found' message appears.
A spectre I almost hesitate to raise: Project Gutenberg has as its goal
the electronic distribution of VAST numbers of (public domain)
texts. There's a lot here, BUT be warned that retrieving the full text
of, say, Dickens' _Tale of Two Cities_ will take a while (it's about 800
K), so it's best to do this sort of work when demand is low --early
mornings, weekends, etc. Once you've retrieved a text you CAN search it
for a string (like 'heart') using the UNIX / command. With all that
warning, here's how to get to an index of
Project Gutenberg texts!