Research Guides: English: Literary Research

Getting Started

Things you might look for when doing literary research

How different theoretical lenses can be applied to a work
Biographical Information about the author
Historical/cultural/social context
The conversation literary scholars are having about the work
How different literary devices are deployed
Information about genre or literary context

Writing & Research Help:

What Makes a Good Literature Paper?
Tips on writitng a good thesis from Purdue OWL

Search for Articles, Books, and More!

Biographical Information

Resources for looking up information about authors

Dictionary of Literary Biography - Gale Literature This link opens in a new window
Biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres.
Provides more than 16,000 biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres. Includes full-page images from the entire Dictionary of Literary Biography series (the DLB Main Series, DLB Documentary Series, and DLB Yearbook Series), a mainstay in the reference collection for over 30 years.
Contemporary Authors - Gale Literature This link opens in a new window
Provides biographical and bibliographical information on more than 120,000 U.S. and international authors.
This resource covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, playwrights, nonfiction writers, journalists, and scriptwriters.
Something About the Author - Gale Literature This link opens in a new window
Read about the lives and works of authors and illustrators of literature for children and young adults, with full page images of Something About the Author from volume 1 through volume 300.

Context - Historical/Social/Cultural

Resources to find primary and secondary sources to give you historical background on a work

Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Good for international historical context.
This resource excludes the history of United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life. Indexes and abstracts articles from more than 2,000 journals. Also includes book reviews and dissertations. Indexing coverage begins in 1954.

This database is produced by ABC-CLIO, but you access it through the EBSCO website.
America: History & Life This link opens in a new window
Good for US historical context.
A complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. It indexes and abstracts more than 2,000 journals published worldwide. Book reviews, media reviews, and disserations are also indexed. Indexing began in 1954. This database is produced by ABC-CLIO, but you access it through EBSCO.
Cambridge Histories Online This link opens in a new window
Historical context.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Good for social and cultural context.
A comprehensive social sciences research database with full text for more than 1,700 journals dating back to 1908. It also provides full text for more than 830 books and 14,000 conference papers. Subject indexing is based on a sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers.
Communication and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
Good for mass media/popular culture analyses
This database offers cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 440 journals in communication and mass media, selective coverage of nearly 200 additional journals, and full text for more than 500 journals. Many of the more important journals have indexing, abstracts, PDFs and searchable cited references from their first issues (dating as far back as 1915) to the present.

Special features include a Communication Thesaurus, searchable cited references for peer-reviewed journals, and profiles providing biographical and bibliographical data for of more than 3,000 authors in the field.

The database incorporates the content of CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association) and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Penn State) along with numerous other journals in communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields of study.
New York Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window
Source of primary historical information: New York Times newspaper articles from 1851-2007.
OED Online This link opens in a new window
Online version of The Oxford English Dictionary, the authoritative guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past, from across the English-speaking world
The OED is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. 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.

The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

As the OED is a historical dictionary, its entry structure is very different from that of a dictionary of current English, in which only present-day senses are covered, and in which the most common meanings or senses are described first. For each word in the OED, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence.

Updated quarterly with at least 2,500 new and revised entries.
ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
A finding aid to primary source materials held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives worldwide.
ArchiveGrid allows you to search for historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other primary source material held in archives throughout the world. It includes descriptions of archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies and archives. It also provides information useful for contacting an archive to arrange a visit to examine materials or to order copies.

History, Literature, Critical Theory by Dominick LaCapra

Finding Book Reviews

Literary Hub
Use this website to find multiple reviews for books all in one place

Other excellent literary/book review sites:

Literary Criticism & Analysis

Resources for looking up literary criticism written by scholars

MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
A database of scholarly articles in the fields of literature, language, linguistics, and folklore produced by the Modern Language Association of America.
Coverage begins in 1923.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
An archive of scholarly full-text journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
The JSTOR archive holds the complete digitized back runs of core scholarly journals, starting with the very first issues, some dating as far back as the 1600s. Subject areas include the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

JSTOR includes various collections, and the St. Kate's Library has purchased the Arts and Sciences Collections I-VII and the Biological Sciences Collection. These collections include subsets for ecology & botany, language & literature, and music.

JSTOR's agreements with publishers often include a "moving wall," which means that the most recent years (typically 3-5 years) are not available.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
An Internet search engine for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Our link to Google Scholar enables you to see which documents you can access through St. Kate's.