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LTWR300B: History & Practice of Literary Commentary II

Articles & Databases

Articles appropriate to your research will be located in a variety of databases. You need to find scholarly discussion as opposed to book reviews or opinion pieces, so be sure to review the quality of the article before assuming it will work.

In this section, there is a list of databases that are most useful to literature researchers. The MLA Specifics tab provides help in effectively reading and using the MLA database results.

The MLA database is a well-regarded online resource to literature studies and definitely where you want to begin your search!

 

LTWR 300B -- Databases

The following list is a suggested core collection to review in looking for literary criticism, your research may take you to additional sources.

  • MLA 
    Includes abstracts of articles from critical literary and language journals.
  • Project Muse 
    Hundreds of scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics
  • JSTOR 
    Contains (EXCEPT for the latest five years) core scholarly journals in sociology, history, economics, political science, mathematics, African-American & Asian studies, literature, humanities, music, and biological, health & general sciences.
  • Literature Criticism Online 
    Extensive collection of literary criticism authors and their works from antiquity to present.

Additional sources of interest in literature research

  • Oxford English Dictionary A guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It includes etymological analysis, listings of variant spellings, and shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet
  • Dictionary of Literary Biography Biographical and critical reception studies of over 140,000 authors as well as year-in-review articles.
  • America: History & Life
    Abstracts of journal articles covering American & Canadian history, from pre-history to the present.
  • Historical Abstracts

    Historical coverage of the world from 1450 to the present.