Prosody today means both the study of versification and the study of pronunciation. In literary studies, scholars often interchange the word prosody for versification or meter, though each of these terms have complicated and contested histories. His…
Princeton Prosody Archive
Welcome to the Princeton Prosody Archive, a full-text searchable database of thousands of digitized books in English published between 1532 and 1928. The Archive collects historical documents and highlights discourses about the study of language, the study of poetry, and where and how these intersect and diverge.
What began as a collection of texts about versification now includes the study of poetry, grammar, literary history, phonetics, phonology, and many of the complicated ways these discourses converge and diverge over the centuries. As such, we use the words “prosody” and “archive” in their broadest possible senses, intending for scholars to understand the incompleteness of all archives and providing a starting point for new scholarship in historical poetics, historical prosody and the history of linguistics.
The PPA makes several arguments, poses several questions, and welcomes new scholarship based on the work gathered here. What if we began to understand poetics in all of its historical, linguistic, and educational valences? What if literary concepts such as meter and rhythm are historically contingent and fundamentally unstable? What might scholars of distant reading and the novel learn from a collection of materials pertaining to poetry and linguistics?
Rather than a static repository of historical data, the PPA compels users to rethink the past and future of organizing, navigating, conceptualizing, and historicizing large amounts of data—about a single poem or about evolving and contradictory thinking about the technology of poetic language.
The Princeton Prosody Archive is a work in progress. Images and metadata for works viewable on Gale Primary Sources are sourced from Eighteenth Century Collections Online and provided by Gale. Images and metadata for works viewable on HathiTrust are sourced from HathiTrust Digital Library. Please consult our How to Cite page if you are working with this Archive, and please contact us for feedback and questions, or to pitch an essay for the Editorial section of the site.
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What is Prosody?
History of the Archive
2007-2009
As Meredith Martin began writing The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930, she realized that the archival material that supported the book’s argument would not work in a traditional academic monograph. In …
Collections
The Princeton Prosody Archive is divided into six collections, curated by the project team. Users are able to search across collections, within a single collection, or within any combination of collections. Select a collection to view it within the Archive.
Original Bibliography
A collection of works cited in T. V. F. Brogan’s 1981 bibliography, English Versification, 1570-1980: A Reference Guide With a Global Appendix. For more information, see “History of the Archive” under “About.”
Word Lists
A collection of pronunciation guides as well as rhyming dictionaries. Several important reprinted works on pronunciation (i.e. Walker) contain long rhyming dictionaries at the end.