Subject guides: English Literature: Audio-visual materials

This guide provides a general introduction to Library and information resources for the study of literature in English.

Plays, drama, and films on DVD or streaming for English Literature

Media Hopper Create - English Literature Section

The English Literature Section of the University's Media Hopper Create contains more than 100 media including plays, drama, films, documentaries and educational TV programmes recordings which are to be used only for educational and non-commercial purposes under the terms of the ERA Licence. Access is restricted to Edinburgh University members only.

Media Hopper Create - English Literature Section

Video resources in Media Hopper Create are not routinely indexed in Library's catalogue system DiscoverEd.

Examples:

The Poetry Archive

The Poetry Archive is a not-for-profit organisation that produces, acquires and preserves recordings of poets reading their own work out loud. Substantial excerpts from these recording sessions are freely available online through this website and the Children's Poetry Archive.

Audio & video works in ProQuest One Literature

1,300 videos and 1,000 audio tracks of performances and author interviews.

Poetry Archive Audio
Recordings of important contemporary poets. Containing 921 poems with links to author pages. Clips are listed alphabetically by author. Featured poets include Billy Collins, Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Longley alongside historic recordings of Edmund Blunden, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath and many more.
Poets on Screen
The collection contains nearly 900 filmed readings by contemporary poets of both contemporary and classic poems, and provides a unique opportunity to hear and see major authors interpreting their own works and the works of their contemporaries and predecessors.
Shakespeare Audio
The complete Arkangel Shakespeare contains fully dramatized unabridged recordings of all of Shakespeares 38 plays. Each play is recorded by noted actors, many of whom were trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company, such as Simon Russell Beale, Joseph Fiennes, David Tennant, Niamh Cusack and Sir John Gielgud and includes sound effects and music to bring the plays further to life.
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From the William Shakespeare Author's page the audio plays can be easily reached from the related special section Related Audio.

From the Publications section you can select the Audio and Video Works under the Source Type narrow Filter on the left, then you select the third type, Shakespeare Audio. Under the 2003 issue year you'll obtain the alphabetical list by title.

Clicking on the title of a play will bring you to the individual audio plays page from which you will be able to view and select individual scenes to access. Though the audio recordings were not created using any of the editions available in Full Text, the 19th Century Cambridge University Press edition is the closest textually to the modern edition used.

View complete cast and production details for all recordings.

LHC Video Catalogue

The Languages and Humanities Centre (LHC) within the LLC School provides students and staff with access to a large catalogue of around 9,000 films and documentaries, including several hundred plays, drama, films and documentaries related to English literature which were recorded from rare BBC programmes for educational use under the Educational Recording Agency (ERA) license. LHC is located on the first floor of 50 George Square.

Languages and Humanities Centre

LHC Video Catalogue

The Video Catalogue, or VidCat, is a complete listing of all available videos, some of which are also available for streaming via the University's Media Hopper Create. VidCat can be accessed from MyEd staff and students portal. It is located under the Services tab (students) or Teaching and Research tab (staff). If you don't see it, you may need to manually add the channel.

VidCat can be searched by title, keyword, the name of the film director, language, or by media type such as 'documentary', 'animation', 'silent' or 'short' (for short films),

For example, keyword search for 'Shakespeare' will retrieve 80 videos of Shakespeare's plays, while keyword search for 'silent' will find 277 silent films (as of August 2020).

Academic Video Online

Academic Video Online is a multidisciplinary collection of videos that touches on the curriculum needs of virtually every department. With 66,000 titles available now and 400 new titles per month, this collection is unmatched in its breadth. Academic Video Online allows students and researchers alike to analyse unique and valuable content from over 500 producers and distributors around the world.

All individual videos are catalogued in DiscoverEd.

Examples of literature related channels in Academic Video Online:

Literature (730 videos)
Fiction (343 videos)
Drama (35 videos)
Theatre (1071 videos)
Shakespeare Series (15 videos)
How to be a Writer (19 videos)
Vanity Fair (14 videos)
10 Fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen (10 videos)
The Pickwich Papers (12 videos)
Writers on Writing (6 videos)
Charles Dickens (63 videos)
Charlotte Bronté (16 videos)
BBC Literary Adaptations in Video (234 videos)

And many more...

The National Theatre Collection

The National Theatre Collection This link opens in a new window
The National Theatre Collection provides access to 30 high definition streamed video of world-class theatre productions and unique archival material, offering insight into British theatre-making and performance studies. The collection contains 30 video performances. As a supplement to the filmed productions, exclusive digitised archival materials such as prompt scripts, costume designs, and more are available to provide behind-the-scenes background and contextual information.