The Stanford University Libraries have recently acquired Caribbean Literature, a new digital full text collection published by Alexander Street Press. This collection, when complete, will include more than 100,000 pages of belles lettres (poetry, prose and drama) and non-fiction (travelogues, ethnography, dictionaries, etc.); its current size is around 63,000 pages.
The geographic coverage of the collection is the entire Caribbean region; the primary dates of publication included extend from the second half of the 19th century through the present, though works from earlier periods will be included in the next releases.
The collection's principal languages are English, French and Spanish, but Papiemento and various creoles are also included -- indeed, Alexander Street Press claims that its 10,000 pages in the latter set of languages constitute "the largest collection of [Caribbean] local language and dialect yet assembled." Thanks to the publisher's innovative semantic indexing and specially created concordances, works in all these languages are cross-searchable using many different search fields. The collection also boasts of the work of several Nobel Prize winners.
Students and scholars in English, French, Spanish, Comparative Literature, Art History, and other humanities and historical fields will likely benefit from the works assembled here. Although some of these works are held by the Stanford Libraries in print form, more than 50 percent are note, making this acquisition a major enhancement to this fascinating, important and under-studied part of the literary world.
