Library Guides: Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures: Primary Sources

Full-text Collections

Full-text collections include complete texts from a particular literary genre, time period, or covering a particular subject. In most of these collections, individual texts or bodies of texts are searchable, enabling you to trace ideas, subjects, words, and phrases to particular works or authors, as well as throughout types and genres of texts.

Sur, 1931-1992 This link opens in a new window
Full text, searchable digital archive of one of the most important and influential literary magazines published in Latin America in the twentieth century. The digital archive of SUR, 1931-1992 contains images of the complete run of the magazine — including covers, photographs and advertisements — with an interface in both Spanish and English.
Latin American women writers This link opens in a new window
Extensive searchable collection of prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Also included are essays by Latin American feminists and about the feminist movement that address both the universal concerns of women in every age and the distinctive issues of their struggles in the region. The database features 103,624 pages of prose, poetry and drama.
Latino literature This link opens in a new window
Collection of poetry, and drama written citizens and residents of the United States whose heritage is Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, and South American provided by Alexander St. Press. The majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish; more than 6,000 pages of bilingual text; and many Spanglish works. There are approximately 60,000 pages of fiction; 32,000 pages of poetry; and 450 plays, 200 of which are previously unpublished
Feminism in Cuba This link opens in a new window
Covers the feminist movement in Cuba between Cuban independence and the end of the Batista regime. This collection draws on rich primary sources-texts, personal letters, journal essays, radio broadcasts, memoirs from women's congresses-which allow these women to speak in their own voices. The documents, most of which are in Spanish, fall into three categories: works by feminists about feminists and their causes, works by men on the status of women, and literary works by feminist writers that illustrate or discuss the condition of women. Includes Aspiraciones (1918), an early feminist journal published by the Partido Feminista Aspiraciones; La Mujer Moderno (1926), the journal for the Club Femenino de Cuba, the oldest Cuban feminist organization; and La Mujer (1929-1931), the journal of the Partido Demócrata Sufragista. Part of Archives Unbound.

Portals

These resources aid in locating images of works of art or other artifacts, films, scores, and records of artistic or musical performances.

ArchiveGrid
ArchiveGrid covers over four million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more.

PARES (Portal de Archivos Españoles) This link opens in a new window
This resource offers free access to documents with scanned images of the Spanish Archives. In Spanish.

Hemeroteca digital (Madrid)
La “Biblioteca Digital Hispánica”, que tiene como objetivo la consulta y difusión pública a través de Internet del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español conservado en la Biblioteca Nacional de Espana.

Literary Papers and Archives

Archives of Latin American Writers and Intellectuals, Princeton University
Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape
The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape at the Library of Congress dates back to 1943. It contains nearly seven-hundred recordings of poets and prose writers participating in sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory and at other locations around Spain and Latin America. To date, writers from thirty-two countries are represented in this collection which includes readings in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Náhuatl, Zapotec, Aymara, English and Dutch.
Brazil Cordel Literature Web Archive
The Library of Congress' Brazilian chapbook collection is one of the largest in the world, including more than 11,000 items, some as early as the 1930s. This web archive collection is comprised of sites or blogs containing full-text cordel, video or audio clips of repentista performances, and news about cordel-related events. It is important to preserve cordel blogs because they serve a different purpose - to represent the voice of the blogger rather than the organization that sponsored the web site.

ND Special Collections

Latin American Literature in Rare Books and Special Collections at the Hesburgh Library
Special Collections holds substantial print and manuscript collections for the study of Latin America and the Early Modern Hispanic World. The materials range from rare books printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to colonial-era manuscripts, to scarcely-held literary journals, periodicals, and writers' correspondence. Books and manuscript materials related to literary movements of the twentieth-century Southern Cone and Hispanic Caribbean are a particularly deep strength of the department's Latin American holdings. Other strengths include historical materials from colonial and republican Peru as well as the countries of the Southern Cone.

Microfilm Resources

Comedias varias de diferentes autóres de España
Call Number: Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library Microforms [Lower Level] General Collection (Microfilm G996 Reel 17:1-3 )
Publication Date: 17th-18th Centuries
Microfilm collection of Spanish Golden Age Drama from the originals in the University of Pennsylvania Library