Literature
From Simmons Library Research Guides
We have selected these resources to help you find relevant information on your research topic. Please contact a librarian for help using the resources listed in this guide or for help with your research process.
Contents |
Reference and Background Information
Search for Reference sources that contain information about your specific research topic here:
You may also consult the resources below for overviews of the topic that you have chosen to research. Use these resources to help you to put your topic in context and give you the big picture of what information exists about your topic. These resources may have bibliographies at the end of each entry that can help further your research.
- The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
Level 1 Reference PR85 .C29 2006
The Guide covers all literature from all genres and eras from all over the English-speaking world, including writer from Britain, Ireland, USA, Canada, India, Africa, South Africa, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Australia.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography
Level 1 Reference: Multiple Volumes
Dictionary of Literary Biography includes literary biographies and criticism of writers. Each volume is dedicated to a different genre, movement, and/or time period.
- Literary Reference Center
Simmons Eresource
Literary Reference Center (LRC) is a comprehensive literary reference database that provides a broad spectrum of reference information from antiquity to the present day. LRC is a completely full-text database that combines information from over 1,000 books and monographs, major literary encyclopedias and reference works, and hundreds of literary journals.
- LITfinder
Simmons Eresource
LITfinder is a directory of literature. Use it to identify citations for poems, stories, essays, plays, speeches, and more. Full-text for over a quarter of a million cited works are included.
- The Longman Dictionary of Literary Terms: Vocabulary for the Informed Reader
Level 1 Reference PN44.5 .K46 2006
Use this guide to clarify the meaning of terms used to describe literature and the terminology of literary criticism.
Click here for other dictionaries of literary and critical terminology.
- Masterplots : 1,801 Plot Stories and Critical Evaluations of the World's Finest Literature
Level 1 Reference PN44 .M33 1996
Masterplots includes short biographies, critical essays, plot summaries, character explorations, and other details useful for understanding over 1,800 major literary works. More works are evaluated in Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series (Level 1 Reference, PR881 .M39 1987) and Masterplots II: American Fiction Series (Level 1 Reference, PS373 .M37 2000).
- The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Level 1 Reference PS21 .E537 2004
This 4-volume work explores the depth and breadth of American literature from the 1600's to the present. Each of the 350 entries offers essay-length treatment or American literary topics including authors, works, and movements. The entries analyze the historical and social context and long-term impact if each topic.
- The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
Level 1 Reference PR19 .O95 2006
This 5 volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the 1600's to the present. The emphasis of the content is on the work from the U.K. and Ireland. Over 500 signed, cross-referenced essays offer author career biographies, criticism, and analysis of major works, themes, movements, and genres of British Literature.
- Click here to see more Library holdings on Literature in the Library Catalog.
Multicultural Literature
- The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature
Level 1 Reference PS153.M56 G74 2005
This 5-volume work includes alphabetical listings of authors, works, themes, and other issues related to literature by and about multicultural America. Authors and works covered come from many ethnic perspectives, including African, Asian, Arab, and European. Entries are signed, cross-referenced, and include works cited and suggestions for further reading.
- Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook
Level 1 Reference PN452 .M85 2002
This source entries for more than 100 world writers from antiquity to 1945, "who were significantly influenced by cultures other than their own." The scope is truly international, including authors from Eastern and Western countries of the ancient world up to 1945. Signed entries include career biographies, evaluation of criticism, analysis of multicultural themes and contexts, and bibliographies for further reading. The entries focus on the socio-historical circumstances that led to the author's exile, emigration, religious conversion, education, and travel or residence in a foreign country.
- Multicultural Writers Since 1945: An A-to-Z guide
Level 1 Reference PN452 .M88 2004
A companion to Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945, this work picks up where it left off and covers up to about 2000. Entries include career biographies and analysis of the authors' and works' multicultural context in the "Multicultural Theme" and "Survey of Criticism" sections.
- New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage
Level 1 Reference PS153.M56 N475 1996 and Simmons Eresource
The book is organized into sections devoted to Asian American, Caribbean American, European American, and Latin American literatures. Each section is sub-divided into chapter treating unique immigrant groups, such as Pakistani Americans, Korean Americans, and Finnish Americans. Each chapter on an individual immigrant literature gives background information about the immigrant group, its culture, and its immigrant history in the United States; critical analysis of the groups authors, works, genres, and movements; and a bibliography and reference for further research.
- Click these links for more resources on African American, Latino/a, and Asian American literature
Women's and Feminist Literature
- The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature
Level 1 Reference PN471 .B57 1992
This book begins with essays discussing women writers in various regions of the world and time periods. This section is followed by an alphabetical list of cross-referenced, bio-critical list of entries on women writers and major works from all over the world, throughout the world.
- Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature
Level 1 Reference PN471 .S58 2006
This work includes over 500 entries on women, issues, and works that address women's oppression, challenge gender roles, and advocated for equality. Entries are cross-referenced and include bibliographies for further reading. Following the alphabetical entries are several useful resources: Authors by Genre, Major Authors of Feminist Literature and Their Works, A timeline of Major Works of Feminist Literature, a consolidated Primary Source Bibliography, and a consolidated Secondary Source Bibliography. All of this material can be browsed or uncovered by a thorough index that completes the book.
- Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature
Level 1 Reference PN471 .W455 2004
This works includes biographical, cross-referenced entries with bibliographies for further research for feminist writers, defined as those who have have addressed women's oppression, challenged traditional gender roles, and advocated for equality through their literary work. Additionally, a unique element of the the entries is an extensive critical summary of at least one major work. In addition to author biographies, the work includes thematic entries on issues relevant to feminist literature like Spirituality, Domesticity, and Autobiography.
- Masterplots II: Women's Literature Series
Level 1 Reference PN471 .M37 1995
This work includes over 500 entries that examine women's literature from the ancient times to the late twentieth century. As in all Masterplots, this resource includes short biographies, critical essays, plot summaries, character explorations, and other details useful for understanding literary works.
- Orlando: Women Writers in the British Isles, Past and Present
Simmons Eresource
Orlando is a comprehensive electronic database relating to women's writing in the British Isles. It offers a wealth of biographical and critical information on more than 1000 writers, together with entries on literary and historical events.
- Women Writers Online
Simmons Eresource
Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. It has texts by pre-Victorian women writers. All of these texts can be browsed, searched, and analyzed.
- Click these links for more information on women's, feminist, and lesbian and gay literature.
World Literature
- Cyclopedia of World Authors
Level 1 Reference PN451 .M36 2004
This resources provides biographical sketches for world authors from all over the world, throughout history--though emphasis is on English-language authors of the 20th Century. Entries include career biographies, lists of the authors' major works, and annotated bibliography for further research.
- Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century
Level 1 Reference PN771 .E5 1999
This work includes over 2,000 signed, cross-referenced entries on world authors from the 20th Century with lists of works and bibliographies for further research. Also included are national surveys that review literature from all over the world by regions, and entries on genres, movements, and issues effecting literature throughout the world.
- Encyclopedia of World Writers
Level 1 Reference PN451 .E55 2005
This resource includes approximately on authors from antiquity up through the 20th century, with emphasis on the novelists, poets, dramatists, and short-story writers who are most frequently included in anthologies. Entries are cross-referenced and include biographical sketches, synopses of major works, and bibliographies for further research.
- Timetables of World Literature
Level 1 Reference PN524 .K87 2003
This is a useful work that is divided into sections by era: The Classical Age, The Middle Ages, The Sixteenth Century, and so on through the Twentieth Century. Within each section, most years are included chronologically listing births, deaths, literary events, and publications by nation. The work includes an index which is useful for finding information when the time period is unknown.
- World Authors
Level 1 Reference PN451 .W3
The World Authors Series represent a wide variety of nations, cultures and eras: classical Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, Renaissance through the current century. The authors profiled wrote in over 30 languages including Italian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Icelandic, and they include poets, novelists, dramatists, chroniclers, essayists, scientists, and theologians. This title presents biographical articles on major poets, dramatists, essayists, social scientists, and biographers during the time period represented in each volume. Profiles include career biographies, with discussions of the authors social context and their literary significance, critical evaluation of major works, a list of the author’s principal works with date first published, a list of major critical works, and a portrait or photograph, where available.
Literary Criticism
Use these sources to find out more about literary critics, critical theories, and schools of critical thought.
- The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory
Level 1 Reference PN94 .C695 2002
Arranged geographically and than by theorist, this work provides succinct explanations of the theories developed and inspired by individuals. The entries also explore critical applications to theory. Entries include works cited and lists of suggested further reading.
- Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms
Level 1 Reference PN81 .E63 1993
An exhaustive survey of literary theories, theorists, and terminology presented in a scholarly yet readable format. Entries are signed, cross-referenced, and many include source lists for further reading.
- Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory
Level 1 Reference PN98.W64 E53 1997
Includes cross-referenced entries for key feminist ideas, theories, and critics affecting literary theory, with bibliographies for further research. Overviews of ideas like "creativity," "eroticism" and "war;" time periods; and literary movements are explored in a literary context through a feminist lens, with an emphasis on feminism in the U.S. and U.K. since the 1970's. Includes name, subject, key word, and related topics indexes.
- A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory
Level 1 Reference PN44.5 .H37 2000
Includes over 70 terms used in literary theory and criticism. Useful in explaining and contextualizing often-contested terminology whose usage is often unique to the field of literary criticism.
- The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism / edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman
Level 1 Reference PN81 .J554 2005
The format of this guide is a single, alphabetical list of entries that includes theorist, theories, schools of thought, and major areas of critical application. Entries are signed, cross-referenced, and some include citations for further reading.
- Ohio State Open Access Initiative
Free Online
The Ohio State University Press, per their Open Access initiative, has put around 60 titles online as PDFs. Most of these titles are out of print and are focused on literary criticism. "All titles available this way, whether old or new, have gone through the exact same peer review process as our printed books. Any book that carries our imprint—no matter what medium is being used—has been approved by our Editorial Board after a thorough vetting process."
Finding Articles
Below are suggested databases and indexes for articles on the topic that you have chosen to research. These databases include articles from newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals. Articles are shorter and more narrowly focused than books or reference materials so you should use them after you have narrowed your topic.
- MLA Bibliography
Simmons Eresource
Provides some one million citations for items from over 4,000 journals and series published worldwide. It also indexes books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Each record contains a bibliographic citation for a journal article, book, or other item, and library holdings for the journal title, book, or other item.
- Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)
Level 1 Reference PR83 .A59 and Simmons Eresource
ABELL comprehensively covers materials such as monographs, periodical articles, literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations that are published anywhere in the world.
- LION: Literature Online
Simmons Eresource
Fully searchable library of English and American poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key secondary sources. Literature Online features an ever-growing collection of over 330,000 works of poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key criticism and reference sources. The primary texts in Literature Online include English poetry from 600 to the present, American and African-American poetry from 1603 to the present, The Faber Poetry Library, English fiction from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, English drama from 1280 to 1915, and American drama from 1762 to 1832. Secondary Sources include LIFT, a literary journal index with full text of many articles, Webster's Dictionary, the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, the King James Bible, links to other Web resources, bibliographies for over 400 authors, and biographies for over 1,000 of the most-studied authors.
- JSTOR
Simmons Eresource
JSTOR offers both multidisciplinary and discipline-specific collections. Provides full-text backfiles of many core scholarly journals, some dating back to the 1800s. However, JSTOR is not the database for current issues as it focuses on older journals.
- Project MUSE
Simmons Eresource
Offers nearly 250 quality journal titles from 40 scholarly publishers. As one of the academic community's primary electronic periodicals resources, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. Project MUSE is setting the standard for scholarly electronic journals in the humanities and social science.
- Literary Reference Center
Simmons Eresource
Literary Reference Center (LRC) is a comprehensive literary reference database that provides a broad spectrum of reference information from antiquity to the present day. LRC is a completely full-text database that combines information from over 1,000 books and monographs, major literary encyclopedias and reference works, and hundreds of literary journals.
- Contemporary Literary Criticism
Simmons Eresource
An extensive collection of critical essays on contemporary authors. Each CLC - Select entry contains a biographical/critical introduction, listing of principal works, and sources for further study.
- Magill's Bibliography of Literary Criticism : Selected Sources for the Study of More than 2,500 Outstanding Works of Western Literature
Level 1 Reference PN81 .M245
This multi-volume work is arranged alphabetically by author. Under each author is a entry for selected works with listings for major critical treatment. The scope is international, and criticism is from the beginning of time up to 1978, with emphasis on critical work from the 1960's and 1970's. While much of the citations will be duplicated in MLA Bibliography with the edition of newer criticism as will, the format of Magill's makes identifying key works quite easy.
- Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short Story Writers, and Other Creative Writers, 1900-1960
Level 1 Reference PN94 .T83
This work presents excerpts of literary criticism on the works of major literary writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists, of 1900 to 1999 Each excerpt is prefaced by an annotation that explains the critic's reputation and critical philosophy and providing a synopsis of the excerpt. Every fourth volume is a Topics volume covering major literary movements, trends and other topics. Volumes include author, nationality, topic and title indexes.
- Humanities Fulltext
Simmons Eresource
A database of article citations on topics in the Humanities, some available full-text. Includes content from more than 300 key humanities publications, including feature articles, book reviews, interviews, obituaries, bibliographies, original works of fiction (including dramas and poems), and reviews of plays, operas, ballets, dance, musicals, movies, and television and radio programs.
- Academic Search Complete
Simmons Eresource
Academic Search Complete is a great place to start your search for both popular and scholarly articles, no matter what your topic is! It contains journals from almost every topic and is designed specifically for academic institutions. It provides more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, 4,400 of which are peer-reviewed journals. This resource also features content as far back as 1865.
- Academic Onefile
Simmons Eresource
Academic Onefile contains 8,000 academic journals, the majority in full-text, available in HTML and PDF formats. In addition it contains hundreds of podcasts and transcripts from NPR, CNN, and the CBC.
- Expanded Academic ASAP
Simmons Eresource
From arts and the humanities to social sciences, science and technology, this database meets research needs across all academic disciplines. Access scholarly journals, news magazines, and newspapers - many with full text and images. Updated daily.
TIP: Use the Advanced Search for a more precise search!
Searching the Web
Simmons librarians have created a customized search engine that allows you
to find English Literature information on the free web.
Use this English Literature Google Custom Search Engine box to search all select, quality free web sites at the
same time:
You may also wish to go directly to, or bookmark, the English Literature Google Custom Search Engine
Tips for Searching the Internet:
- Use the advanced search function, which is available from most search engines:
- Google - See also "Advanced Search Tips"
- Ask - Click "Advanced." See also "Advanced Search Tips"
- Live (MSN) - See also "Options"
- Exalead - See also "Exalead FAQ"
- Yahoo! Search
- Limit your search to .edu and .gov sites. These often provide quality research, statistics, and commentary. Sites ending in .org often have good information, too, but are likely to espouse a strong stance or bias on the issues they cover and may not be objective.
- Try Scandoo, which presents search results from Google, Yahoo! Search, or Live (MSN) with an evaluation about the objectivity, credibility, and overall reliability of the site.
- Consider using a directory of pre-screened, annotated sites:
Writing Style and Citation
For more information on style and citation for this discipline, please contact the Simmons College Writing Center
You may also consider consulting these resources:
- Writing Resources
Free Online
The Writing Center provides online resources for citing your research. If you are unsure of which citation style to use, consult your professor and consider the following:- Use APA (American Psychological Association) when your topic is in the Social Sciences
- Use ASA (American Sociological Association) when your topic is in Sociology
- Use MLA (Modern Language Association) when your topic is in the Humanities
- Use Chicago/Turabian when your topic is in Literature, History or the Arts
- Use CSE (Council of Science Editors) when your topic is in the Sciences
- RefWorks
Simmons Eresource
RefWorks is a great program for organizing articles, books, and other materials you need for research. You can also use RefWorks to create bibliographies, create in text citations in your paper (Write-N-Cite), and share your research with others. Access RefWorks from the A-Z list of resources on the library's web page, and then follow the instructions to create your own username and password. We hold RefWorks Clinics throughout the semester. For more information, ask a reference librarian
