LibGuides: Literature: Consult research guides

Reader's guides

Companions, plot summaries, critical overviews, reading guides and more.

Gale Literature
Good for: Finding literary criticism.
Contains: Scholarly articles, overviews, and literary reference works.

ProQuest One Literature
Poetry, drama and prose; also literature criticism journals, ebooks, and key reference resources.

Literature Reviews - Oxford Handbooks Online
Scholarly research reviews on major authors, literary movements, and critical approaches.
Oxford Bibliographies
Scholarly topic overviews and annotated bibliographies with expert literature reviews from a wide range of disciplines.
Video tutorial for Oxford Bibliographies

MLA International Bibliography - "review article" search
Example MLA search to find articles discussing recent scholarship - substitute your broad category of interest in the top box
YWES Year's Work in English Studies
This journal publishes annual analytic overviews of new literary criticism organized by genre and time period.
Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.
Annual review of new scholarship
Literature Compass
Journal with articles that skew toward literature reviews.

Find reference books

Literary Research Guide
An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies
James L. Harner

Gale Literature
Good for: Finding literary criticism.
Contains: Scholarly articles, overviews, and literary reference works.
ProQuest One Literature
Poetry, drama and prose; also literature criticism journals, ebooks, and key reference resources.
Credo General Reference
Good for: Background information to start your research.
Contains: Dictionaries, encyclopedias, quotations, thesauri, and bilingual dictionaries.
Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale Literature)
Good for: Gathering background information about literary authors and their works.
Contains: Biographical overviews of literary authors.
Lexicons of Early Modern English
1480-1702
Explore word histories in this compilation of over 150 dictionaries from the early modern period
Compiles over 150 monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries and glossaries from the early modern period in which either source or target language is English, as well as linguistic treatises, and encyclopedic or topical works. A half-million word-entries devised by contemporary speakers of early modern English describe the meaning of words, and their equivalents in languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other tongues encountered then in Europe, America, and Asia.
Theatre in Context
Reference texts in American theater, as well as images of posters, playbills, photos, architectural images, floor plans, and other ephemera.
Update frequency: quarterly

Motif-index of folk-literature
Stith Thompson. Motif-index of folk-literature : a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends.

Oxford English Dictionary
Meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past.
Online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. A guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. It also offers the best in etymological analysis, listings of variant spellings, and shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dynamic encyclopedia of philosophy.
Professional philosophers donate their time and labor to collaboratively write, referee, and maintain encyclopedia entries. A freely available encyclopedia.

Literary research guide : an annotated listing of reference sources in English literary studies by James L. Harner
Call Number: Z2011 .H34 2002

ISBN: 0873529839

Avoid reinventing the wheel by discovering what research aids already exist. Published by the MLA, Harner's guide is the definitive source list for literary scholars.
The Art of Literary Research by Richard D. Altick; John J. Fenstermaker
Call Number: PR56 .A68 1993

ISBN: 0393962407

Publication Date: 1992-09-17

For interested readers who have other vocational plans, its authors-experienced researchers themselves-provide an intimate view of the way professional scholars go about their specialized and challenging tasks.
Textual scholarship : an introduction by D.C. Greetham
Call Number: Z1001 .G7 1992

ISBN: 0815317913
A critique of modern textual criticism by Jerome J. McGann
Call Number: P47 .M34 1992

ISBN: 0813914183
A rationale of textual criticism by G. Thomas Tanselle
Call Number: PN81 .T318 1989

ISBN: 0812214099