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 or film adaptations (hint: use the DVDs & videos search link on the right-hand side of the Virgo screen

Sample searches:    

william shakespeare [author] for all works written by Shakespeare
william shakespeare [subject] for books *about* Shakespeare
‘merchant of venice’ [title] for editions of the play as well as criticism about it
Truncation: theat$ for theater, theatre, theatrical, etc.
Booleans: (renaissance or elizabethan) and (theat$ or drama) and costume

You can also try out VIRGObeta, the new library catalog currently under development. VIRGObeta features relevance ranking, faceted browsing, and many other improvements.

Literature Online (LION) includes searchable, annotated texts of all of Shakespeare's plays (from the 1863 William George Clark edition).  To find a specific play, type its title in the "Quick Search" box.  You will also see links to free editions of the plays on the web, citations for scholarly articles, and links to brief reference works about the plays or related terms (e.g. "burlesque", "tragedy"). 

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains page images of virtually every edition of Shakespeare's works published before 1700.  Some have been fully transcribed and are thus searchable, but note that the original spellings have been retained.

Literature Resource Center is a great place to begin research on any author or literary topic, including Shakespeare. It includes full-text articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography (a great source!) and other biographical and critical compilations, 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.  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.

Search VIRGO to find all videorecordings of productions and film adaptations of the plays that the library owns (hint: use the DVDs & videos search link on the right-hand side of the Virgo screen).  The videos are held in the Robertson Media Center on the 3rd floor of Clemons Library.  

Theatre in Video contains streaming video of over 350 play productions, including all of the plays on your syllabus.  Simply search for a title to view the play.

ARTstor contains a wide variety of art images.  You might search for portraits of Shakespeare, drawings of scenes from the plays, blueprints of the Globe Theatre, or costumes from the Elizabethan period.

Classical Music Library and Naxos Music Library will allow you to search for music from the Elizabethan period, and listen to it online.

The UC Davis Library maintains a call number browsing guide for Shakespeare resources.  Because they use the same Library of Congress call number system that we do, these call number ranges will be the same in our library.  In Alderman, the PR books are located in the 4th floor New Stacks.

Here's a sample from the UC Davis guide: