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Finding Literary Criticism in the Library

  • General Arrangement in the Stacks – by type of literature, then time period, then author

  • Books by an author, criticism of the author’s writing and biographies are shelved together

  • Authority (subject searches and author names)

  • General Literature Classifications
     

      • PN (General Literature)
      • PQ (Romance Literatures), PT (Germanic Literature). 
      • PR (English Literature)
      • PS (American Literature)
         
  • Keyword Searches in the Library Catalog
     
      • Author’s name (as keyword or subject, not an author search)
      • Title of Work (remember to use quotation marks)
      • Subheadings – criticism, interpretation
 

Reference Works

Remember that there are also many reference works that are about literature in a specific genre or from a specific set of authors (African American, Feminist, Nature Writers, Hispanic, etc.)

Contemporary Literary Criticism
 Ref PN 771 .C59

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism
 Ref PN 771 .T84

Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism
 Ref PN  761 .N5

Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Ref PS 21 .E537 2004

Critical Survey of Long Fiction
 Ref PN 3451 .C7 & Ref PR 821 .C7

Drama Criticism
Ref PN 1625 .D73

Critical Survey of Drama
 Ref PN 1625 .C68 2003

Short Story Criticism
Ref PN 3373 .S395


Online Databases

To find articles from scholarly journals in literature, check the following online databases.  Use the Find Resources function in ReSearchPoint to browse a list of available indexes and database or use the Custom Search function and select the Language & Literature category.

Humanities Full Text

Bibliographic index to articles from more than 350 English-language periodicals, plus the full text of over 95 of those periodicals. Periodical coverage includes some of the best-known scholarly journals and numerous lesser-known but important specialized magazines

 

EbscoHost:  MLA International Bibliography & Academic Search Elite

MLA International Bibliography is a bibliography of journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to 1963 and contains over 1.6 million citations from more than 4,400 journals and series and 1,000 book publishers.  Academic Search is a multi-disciplinary database offers full text to many of it 2,000+ scholarly/general journals/magazines; 1,500 of these are peer-reviewed. Full-text coverage dates back as far as 1985.  

Project Muse

Provides electronic full-text access to scholarly journals in the arts and humanities and social sciences.  It includes nearly 200 journals dating back to 1993. 

JSTOR
Provides electronic access to back issues of core journals in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. You will not find materials from the last 3-5 years in this online journal archive.

The Find It! button will bring up a screen that provides a link to electronic access, if it is available; a link to check the library catalog for a print copy available from the library’s traditional collection, and also provides you with a direct link to an interlibrary loan request, if necessary.


 

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This page last modified: Sunday, January 06, 2008