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Literature: Home

A guide to finding library resources than can help with your literature courses.

Starting Out

Starting out with finding research in literary criticism can be daunting. Don't worry! The library is here to help. Check out the valuable resources in this guide to help you find books and articles for your research. 

A Database is a searchable collection of information. In library research, a database is where you find journal, newspaper, magazine articles, and more. Each database contains thousands of articles which can be searched for with keywords and subject terms.

Literary Criticism is the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature (merriamwebster.com).

Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism are the different lenses that critics use to view, discuss, and analyze works of literature. They allow critics to focus on a particular aspect of a work they find important. For a good overview check out the Purdue OWL. Examples are Eco-Criticism, Feminist, Marxist, New Historicism, Post-Colonial, Postmodern, and Psychoanalytic.

Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks

  • Works in Translation can pose an issue to researchers. You may need to find out if there are multiple spellings of an author’s name or multiple translations of the title.
    • For Example: The Chinese Classical Novel His-yu Chi, translated as Journey to the West, has also been published as Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China. The author’s name may be spelled as “Wu Chen’en” or “Wu Cheng’en.”
  • Quotation marks will force the search engine to search for your exact phrase (or title). Example: “Death of a Salesman”
    • If you were interested in the theme of the “American Dream” in Miller’s play, you might enter a search like “Death of a Salesman” AND “American dream” to narrow the number of results to only those on the theme you are interested in.
  • Truncation and Wildcards can be used to expand your search when words may have slightly different spelling. Remember that databases will often search for an exact match.
    • Truncation is adding an asterisk to the end of a stem word in order to retrieve multiple variations. For example, the search child* will retrieve using terms such as child, children, childhood.
    • Wildcards is using a question mark or exclamation point within a word to retrieve different spellings, such as wom?n for women and woman and col?r for color and colour.