Eclat bills itself as the “essential” site for the study of comparative literature and other literary fields, though it is essentially a linking site to online materials for graduate study in the humanities. It is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and was maintained by two graduate students at that institution. Most of the links point to local resources for graduate students at Pennsylvania; but it does include resources that current and prospective graduate students and even faculty at other universities would want to examine. Researchers can use Eclat as a convenient bookmark file for other sites relevant to the study of the humanities on the Web.
The site has a very simple design (it consists of a single page with a hyperlinked table of contents at the top to facilitate navigation); and it uses few graphics and no frames, so that almost any browser can download it quickly. It does tend to bury its links in long paragraphs of text; but the viewer will not have to hunt for resources on subsidiary pages. Most of the links are still active; but the page has not been updated since 1997; so some of its resources are no longer available or the URLs have changed (this is especially true for the other university sites). The information on the Comparative Literature program at Penn and the links to the Van Pelt Library resources will be beneficial only for local patrons who can access their site license databases.
The rest of the site is directed at general users seeking information on literary study. There are lists of other comparative literature programs in North American universities and telnet links to the American Comparative Literature Association and other professional organizations. The links to literary theory sites include well‐known projects such as the Carnegie‐Mellon English Server and other sites with texts and bibliographies sponsored by institutions such as the University of Virginia; University of California, Santa Barbara; and other important programs.
Students and researchers will appreciate the links to other significant literary sites (including Jack Lynch’s Literary Research Tools on the Net) and links to the Library of Congress, the British Library’s Portico site, and the Bodleian Library’s Web Server. There is an adequate, though not extensive, list of electronic text/humanities computing sites and e‐journals in literature and critical theory. More recent full‐text literary archives are not included; and there are no groupings of sites for different national literatures or literary periods. Thus researchers can use Eclat as a starting point for locating online resources in those areas; but they would need to supplement their search by visiting the links on those other sites (especially ones such as Columbia’s or Rutger’s lists of online resources).
Although Eclat has some gaps in its coverage and is somewhat out of date, it is still worth exploring and can assist advanced students and faculty in literary programs in their search for relevant information on the Web. I would recommend this site with the caveat that it is not the one “essential” site for comparative literature programs in the USA, but a good starting point in the search for additional, more current resources in the field.
