English Language & Literature  Tags: english literature databases prose poetry fiction criticism  

Don't hesitate to contact me at any time for help with your research for this class, or any of your other classes.  If I'm not available, you can contact a reference librarian using our Ask a Librarian page.

Use VIRGO, the U.Va. Library’s online catalog, to:

• Find books on your topic.  The Details button will show you publication information about the book, and the A Look Inside tab will often provide a detailed table of contents.
• Find videorecordings of play productions (hint: use the DVDs & videos search link on the right-hand side of the Virgo screen

Sample searches:    

lorraine hansberry [author] for all works written by the author
lorraine hansberry [subject] for books *about* the author
‘raisin in the sun’ [title] for editions of the work
Truncation: raci$ for racial, racially, racism, racist, etc.
Booleans: black or african american; hansberry and criticism; (theater or drama) and scenery [subject]

Literature Resource Center is a great place to begin research on a specific author. It includes full-text articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography (a great source!) and other biographical and critical compilations about authors, along with reference articles & citations.

Start by searching the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB), the most comprehensive resource for finding scholarly articles (as well as books and dissertations) about literature in all languages.  It indexes the broadest range of literary sources (including over 4,000 journals), but it is not a full-text resource, meaning that you can only search the description of an article, rather than the text of the article.  To get the full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in VIRGO.

IIPA: International Index to the Performing Arts indexes articles from scholarly and trade periodicals about the performing arts, including theater and stagecraft.  If you're looking for discussion of more technical aspects of the theater (set, staging, direction, performance, etc.) this is a good resource.

As you move deeper into your topic, and begin looking for resources that discuss themes, techniques, or subjects related to it, you may want to try searching some full-text databases:

Project Muse provides full-text searching of recent articles from major scholarly journals, including about 120 journals about literature.  Not as comprehensive as MLAIB, but the full-text search will do a better job of picking up matches for specific themes or subjects.  Articles are immediately available as PDFs.

JSTOR contains back issues (usually five years old or older) of significant scholarly journals in many subjects, including language and literature.  Like Project Muse, JSTOR is not as comprehensive as the MLAIB, but offers the advantages of full-text searching and instant access to PDFs.

Academic Search Complete is a huge general database covering all subjects.  It will return scholarly articles, as well as articles in popular magazines and newspapers.  Most of the articles cited are available in full text.

North American Theatre Online contains detailed information about plays and productions, theaters, playwrights, and actors.  It also includes searchable full text of over 1200 plays by African American dramatists, including many on your syllabus.

Most reviews can be found in newspapers.  In addition to Academic Search Complete (see above), use LexisNexis to find relatively recent newspaper articles (less than 15 years old).  For older articles, ProQuest Historical Newspapers contains full text of four major US newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune), dating back to their initial dates of publication. 

Use VIRGO to find encyclopedias, bibliographies, research guides, and other reference sources.  One helpful source is the Gale Literary Criticism Series (the multi-volume sets in the PN section of the Reference Room.  Grab any volume and search the index in the back for author, topic, or title.  For example, searching for Lorraine Hansberry lists several entries about the author, including one in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 192, and an entry about Raisin in the Sun in Contemporary Literary Criticism 62.  These entries compile excerpts of significant criticism over the years, and are a good way to survey a lot of scholarly information quickly.