Library Research for Literary Criticism
Books, Videos & CDs:
Reference books, as well as all of our other books (and videos, DVDs, and CDs) can be found through our Online Catalog.
To find criticism of a particular work or the works in general of a particular author, either try searching for the title of the work (as a subject) or search for the author (as a subject). For short stories, you may need to go to the actual book of criticism on an author and check the index for your particular story. You can also try a keyword search using your author's name and "criticism" as a keyword.
To find books in other libraries:
Other Library Catalogs - ABLS, UNCA, UNC-CH, etc.
WorldCat - searches the collections of libraries all over the world and indexes books, audiovisuals, & archival and manuscript materials.
NetLibrary, Greenwood, and other E-Book Collections - around 50,000 full-text online e-books.
Online Reference Sources:
Literature Resource Center - provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline and covers more than 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,000 of the most-studied authors.
Literature Online - includes more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key criticism and reference resources.
Magazines & Journal Articles:
You might try looking in these "Big Full Text" databases first - they try to cover all subjects and contain lots of full-text articles:
Academic Search Premier
MasterFILE Premier
Proquest Research Library
JSTOR - an excellent source that contains the complete back runs of scholarly journals full text (the most recent years are not included). Includes almost 70 journals covering language and literature.
MLA Bibliography - a standard index for language and literature. You must look here if you are doing research on a literary work! The downside is that it's not full-text, so you will have to determine if you can get the article elsewhere in our library, or via interlibrary loan. See the WWC Periodical Holdings list to figure out if we have a certain journal.
General Humanities Indexes:
Arts & Humanities Search Humanities Index
Other Biographical Sources :
American National Biography Biography Resource Center
Newspapers:
The New York Times Historical - full coverage back to the first issue in 1851 through 1999.
The New York Times - full coverage from 1980 to the present. Also includes The New York Times Book Review, back to 1997.
Internet Sources:
Our library's
links to literature sites
A few sites dealing with "Southern Literature":
Southern Literature and Culture on the Internet
SSSL: Bibliography
WWC Library Home Page