English and American Literature
This guide will be helpful to undergraduate English majors and to graduate students doing projects requiring extensive research. You may also connect to any of the resources below listed as having Electronic Access by way of the alphabetical database list at http://library.nyu.edu/collections/find_articles_title.html.
Contents
- Librarian for English and American Literature
- Defining Terms in Literature and Theory
- Finding Literary Criticism
- Finding Book Reviews
- Annual Overviews of Scholarly Work
- Full Texts: Literary and Other Works
- Journal Collections
- Historically Specialized Indexes, Bibliographies, and Catalogs
- Finding Web sites focusing on a specific author
- Associations
- NYU Links
- Special Collections
- Related Guides
Librarian for English and American Literature
Chad Curtis
Librarian for Literary Studies and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
New York University
Bobst Library, Mezzanine
70 Washington Square So.
New York, NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-2517
E-mail: chad.curtis@nyu.edu
Defining Terms in Literature, Theory, and Philosophy
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (2nd ed., 2001)
The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (rev. ed., 2004)
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) (Select this title from the Publication menu.)
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Finding Literary Criticism
For journal articles, use:
Literature Online (LION)
Literature Online allows simultaneous searching of MLAIB and ABELL. Use the links below to limit searches to one resource.
MLA International Bibliography
Provides listings of books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Provides online access to many of those articles. Covers items published from around 1920 to the present. Updated 10 times per year.
and/or
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)
Unlike MLA, ABELL focuses exclusively on British, American, and Commonwealth literature. Within these subject areas, it provides listings of monographs, journal articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, and collections of essays published from 1920 to the present. Provides online access to many journal articles. Includes listings of unpublished doctoral dissertations for the period 1920-1999. Updated monthly.
For critical responses beginning with those written during the author's lifetime, use:
Literature Criticism Online
Provides access to a wide range of critical essays and reviews for authors from ancient through modern times. Each author covered is represented by a substantial range of critical responses, beginning, in most cases, with critical responses first written within the featured author's own lifetime.
For biographical information, use:
Literature Resource Center
Provides up-to-date biographical information, overviews, and full-text literary criticism on writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world. Includes full-text, searchable versions of the dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, and Contemporary Literary Criticism.
For book-length, introductory overviews of specific authors, genres, or periods, use:
Cambridge Collections Online
Provides full-text access to the Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics and the Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion, and Culture. Each companion features individually authored essays on specific aspects of author, genre, or period.
Twayne's Authors Series
The following specialized resources provide in-depth coverage of a single author:
John Milton Bibliography
"This bibliography tries to bring together all manuscripts and editions of John Milton's works and all studies and critical statements concerning his life and works, all allusions and quotations, and all significant imitations during the years 1624-1799."
Shakespeare Collection: Featuring The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works
Provides full-text access to theater reviews, journal articles, and book articles on the works of Shakespeare.
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online
Finding Book Reviews
Book Review Digest Plus (1983 - present)
Provides listings of reviews of current fiction and non-fiction, along with review excerpts and/or full-text reviews for many titles.
Book Review Digest Retrospective (1905 - 1982)
Provides excerpts from and/or listings of reviews of adult and juvenile fiction and non-fiction.
Literature Criticism Online
Provides full-text access to a wide range of reviews from the time in which a work was originally published. Especially useful for authors of the 18th and 19th centuries, since the early reviews will not be listed in our other book-review databases.
Times Literary Supplement Centenary Archive (1902 - 1990)
Provides full-text access to the Times Literary Supplement from its first issue through 1990.
Annual Overviews of Scholarly Work
The Year's Work in English Studies
Online access: 1919 to date (annual)
Print volumes: Bobst Reference 1 PR5.E6, 1919 to 2004
An evaluative narrative review of scholarly work on English language and literatures written in English that was published during the year being covered. Has included chapters on American literature since volume 35 (1954) and on the Commonwealth literatures since volume 63 (1982).
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
Online access: 1991 to date (annual)
Print volumes: Bobst Reference 1 PN80 .Y43, 1991 to 2003
An evaluative narrative review of scholarly work in the fields of critical and cultural theory that was published during the year being covered.
American Literary Scholarship: An Annual
Online access: only 2000 to date (annual)
Print volumes: Bobst Reference 1 PS3.A47, 1963 to 2004
An evaluative narrative review of scholarly work on periods of American literature or on major writers published during the year being covered.
Full Texts: Literary and Other Works
In cases where the title of a database does not provide a reasonable glimpse of the nature of its contents, notes have been provided below.
Asian American Drama
Black Drama - 1850 to Present
Black Short Fiction
Black Women Writers
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry
Dictionary of Old English / Old English Corpus
The Digital Studio: Electronic Texts in English Language and Literature
The Digital Studio contains numerous CD-ROMs of full-text works in English and American literature.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Early English Books Online (EEBO) Text Creation Partnership (TCP) Collection
EEBO TCP provides access to a subset of the texts contained in the larger EEBO database (to which a link is provided below). Texts in the TCP subset have been enhanced by additional textual mark-up to enable more sophisticated searching options.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
Shakespeare Collection: Featuring the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works
Latino Literature
Literature Online (LION)
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.
Middle English Compendium
North American Indian Drama
North American Theatre Online
North American Women's Drama
North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Past Masters
Text Creation Partnership (TCP)
TCP provides access to subsets of the texts contained in three large historical text collections: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans. Texts in the TCP subsets have been enhanced by additional textual mark-up to enable searching options more sophisticated than what is possible in the original databases.
Twentieth Century North American Drama
Women Writers Online
Some Relevant Journal Collections
American Periodicals Series Online
Provides full-text and full-image access to 1,500 periodical titles and 7 million pages of content, from the first American magazines, published in 1741, to the World War II period. Includes special-interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, women's and children's magazines, and other historically significant periodicals.
British Periodicals (Collections I & II)
Provides full-text and full-image access to hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts, the social sciences, music, archaeology and architecture.
JSTOR
Provides full-text and full-image access to important scholarly journals across many disciplines extending back to their first issues and up to issues published from one to five years ago.
Periodicals Archive Online (PAO)
Provides full-text and full-image access to hundreds of journals published in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and areas of general popular interest. Each periodical is covered back to its first issue, regardless of when it began publication. International in scope, PAO covers periodicals in a number of Western languages. Any search of PAO now includes in its scope British Periodicals Collections I and II (described separately above). Publication dates of articles covered in PAO run from 1665 to 2000.
Project Muse
Provides full-text and full-image access to over 300 humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers. Coverage of these journals typically begins at some point within the last fifteen years and extends up through the latest issue. Many key journals in literature and theory are accessible here.
Historically Specialized Indexes, Bibliographies, and Catalogs
C19: 19th Century Index
Provides integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.
ESTC (English Short Title Catalog)
Lists over 460,000 items published between 1473 and 1800.
Facsimiles of Medieval Manuscripts at Bobst Library
Bobst Library's holdings of Old English and Middle English manuscripts in facsimile, including indexes.
Records of Early English Drama (REED) (Centre for Research in Early English Drama)
Victorian Studies Bibliography Online
Provides listings of "noteworthy publications (including articles, books, and reviews) that have a bearing on the Victorian period. Prepared by the staff of Victorian Studies and a committee of the Victorian Division of the Modern Language Association of America, the Bibliography annually indexes over 400 journals, representing scholarship in a range of disciplines."
Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1824 - 1900)
This index is now available online through C19: 19th Century Index. You may limit your search to the Wellesley Index by selecting it in the "Search Indexes" column.
Finding Websites That Focus on a Specific Author
Searching through Google for an author's name as a phrase (for example, "jane austen") will enable you to find numerous Web Sites in which that name occurs. But if the author is well known, you may find the sheer number of retrievals to be overwhelming.
The following databases will provide you with more limited lists of Web resources, including only resources that have been identified as significant by the database's editors.
Literature Online
When you search for "Authors," your retrieval set will include not merely resources within Literature Online, but also a section titled "Web Sites."
Literature Resource Center
Do an "Author" search. Your retrievals will include a section titled "Additional Resources," which includes Web sites.
Associations
MHRA: Modern Humanities Research Association
MLA: Modern Language Association
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing: SHARP Web
NYU Links
Below are links to the pages of some of the departments and programs at New York University in which English and/or American literature are studied:
Department of English
Program in American Studies
Department of Comparative Literature
Creative Writing Program
Poetics and Theory
Special Collections
The Fales Library and Special Collections
The Fales Library is especially strong in English literature from the middle of the 18th century to the present, documenting developments in the novel. Another key strength is the Downtown Collection, which documents the downtown New York art, performance, and literary scenes from 1975 to the present.
The New York Public Library: Collections and Reading Rooms
Columbia University Libraries: Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Related Subject Research Guides
