The Voice of the Shuttle. This site offers catalogs of links to electronic resources across the broad spectrum of the humanities and related social sciences. It has more topics and subtopics than your average dissertation, but the whole is helpfully arranged by discipline, and fully searchable. VOS is universally considered the best and most comprehensive catalog of virtual resources in the humanities.
More specifically, the VOS "Literature in English" page offers the most and best-organized resources for literary study. This page’s categories are arranged chronologically, by sub-category, and by nation of origin.
Jack Lynch of Rutgers University offers another portal to literary and writing resources: "Literary Resources on the Net." Not as comprehensive as the Voice of the Shuttle, this index might be easier to navigate just because of its smaller size. If you can’t remember where to find the Chronicle of Higher Education, the electronically-posted "Calls for Papers," or the list of Literary Mailing Lists on the Internet, then you should bookmark this site.
As well as resources for studying and appreciating literature, Lynch also offers a selection of literature classes that supplement classroom instruction with a web component. Because one can now find thousands of literature courses on the web, Lynch calls this list "woefully incomplete," but it’s still a good place to begin investigating how other instructors are teaching with the web. The literature syllabi and class pages can be found at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/syllabi.html, while Lynch’s Resources for Writers and Writing Instructors can be found at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/links.html.
This site connects to the tables of contents of books published by The Gale Group, known for their collections of criticism on most major authors, works, and literary movements. To read the actual contents, you’ll have to stroll over to the second floor of Shields Library. To see an example of what's available, conduct a sample search on the Gale holdings on last year's UC Davis visitor Derek Walcott. See also the Gale Literature Resource Center link at http://libcf.ucdavis.edu/subjects/index.cfm?show=a2z.
Housed in Japan, these two sites ("American Authors on the Web" and "British and Irish Authors on the Web") will take longer to load up than most, but they are both worth the wait, for each collects seemingly all the relevant sites devoted to American and British authors, respectively. The best way to use these resources is to call up the pertinent site, stretch and get a snack while it loads, and then use your browser’s "find" function to locate the exact author or text you need. Although some of the links suffer from "link rot," you will find many helpful primary sources here.
Created by the Subject Librarian for English and American Literature at Indiana University, "WWW Resources for English and American Literature" focuses on the web sites of prominent print journals in each genre of literary study. It also links to databases, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the MLA Bibliography that we at U.C. Davis can access via Shields Library.
The IPL Online Literary Criticism Collection contains more than two thousand critical and biographical websites about literary topics that can be searched by any keywords or categories you specify. A few searches reveal that this site calls upon less trustworthy commercial sites as well as the educational sites I’ve been recommending, so after browsing here, you may feel tempted to get out your credit card and buy a book or two.
John Lye of Brock University has web-published this guide to "Critical Reading" as a supplement to his Introduction to Literature seminar. He offers sound advice on analyzing poetry and fiction. You might also investigate the University of Toronto page of handouts on Writing about Literature. My favorite of these, titled "Writing About Literature," is maintained by Norton Publishing.
A great Shakespeare portal; start here with any web-based Shakespeare research.
I quote: "The World Lecture Hall (WLH) contains links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web to deliver university-level academic courses in any language." The "English, Writing, and Rhetoric" section of this site organizes the web sites of more than 200 writing and literature classes. Some of the literary titles include "A Chicken for Every Road: Joking, Comedy and Laughter," "Contemporary Critical Theory," and "Literary Narrative in an Information Age." Note that many of the classes listed here are no longer housed on these universities' servers; the site as a whole needs some pruning.
Shields Library maintains this page of Networked Humanities Databases. Many can be accessed only to a computer on campus or connected to a campus modem bank.