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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 International BibliographyIncludes abstracts of articles from critical literary and language journals.
- Project MuseFull-text coverage for 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 OnlineExtensive collection of literary criticism authors and their works from antiquity to present.
Additional sources of interest in literature research
- Oxford English DictionaryA 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 BiographyBiographical and critical reception studies of over 140,000 authors as well as year-in-review articles.
- America: History & LifeAbstracts of journal articles covering American & Canadian history, from pre-history to the present.
- Historical AbstractsHistorical coverage of the world from 1450 to the present.