Research Librarian for English & Digital Humanities
Questions? Ask us!
Research Help Fall 2023
Need research help? I am available for meetings virtually using Zoom throughout the year. To schedule a virtual research consultation, click the button in my information box to the left, select a day/time on my Make an Appointment page, or contact me directly at slb4kt@virginia.edu. When you make an appointment, you will be sent a Zoom link for us to meet. We can also meet in person! If you would prefer to meet in person or chat another way, please email me.
Starting Points: Databases for Finding Articles - English Language & Literature
- MLA International Bibliography (Ebsco) This link opens in a new windowLists books plus articles and essays from journals and books on literature, linguistics, and folklore. Before 1956 covered only scholarship published in North America.
- ABELL: Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (1922-Present) This link opens in a new windowSearch for monographs, journal articles, critical editions, book reviews, collections of essays and dissertations from anywhere in the world.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowJSTOR provides access to millions of journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. The Archive Journal Collection is included.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new windowProject MUSE hosts more than 800 journals and more than 90,000 books covering the humanities and social sciences from nearly 400 leading university presses, scholarly societies, and related publishers.
Starting Points: All-Purpose Literature Databases
- ProQuest One Literature This link opens in a new windowProQuest One Literature is for scholars who must engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research and course planning.
It contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. - Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new windowFind up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.
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Starting Points: Reference
- Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new windowHas definitions for most of the words in the English language but also information on their origins and quotations showing their range of meanings from the time they entered the language to the present.
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature This link opens in a new windowThe Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature contains over 400 articles and aims to map, over time, the world’s entire landscape of literary expressions and criticism, weaving together the various fields and approaches that make up literature.
- The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & CriticismA full-text searchable database of articles on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.
Literary Research Guide (5th ed) by ISBN: 0873528085Publication Date: 2008This reference guide evaluates important reference materials in English studies. Find an online edition at:
https://oncomouse.github.io/literary-research-guide/
A New Handbook of Literary Terms by ISBN: 030010636XPublication Date: 2007An A-Z guide of terms related to the study and understanding of literature in English.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (3rd ed.) by ISBN: 9781108437738Publication Date: 2019Now in its third edition, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language provides the most comprehensive coverage of the history, structure and worldwide use of English. Fully updated and expanded, with a fresh redesigned layout, and over sixty audio resources to bring language extracts to life, it covers all aspects of the English language including the history of English, with new pages on Shakespeare's vocabulary and pronunciation, updated statistics on global English use that now cover all countries and the future of English in a post-Brexit Europe, regional and social variations, with fresh insights into the growing cultural identities of 'new Englishes', English in everyday use with new sections on gender identities, forensic studies, and 'big data' in corpus linguistics, and digital developments, including the emergence of new online varieties in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.
Starting Points: Full-Text Literature Collections
- EEBO: Early English Books Online (new ProQuest Platform) This link opens in a new windowEvery significant work published in English from 1475 to 1700. Searchable text and page images of books, pamphlets, prayer books, proclamations, almanacs, calendars,etc. in all subjects. See also Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800.
- ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collection Online (1701-1800) This link opens in a new windowSearchable full text and page images for books, almanacs, broadsides, magazines, pamphlets, etc in any language from the British Isles and North America, and in English from the rest of the world. See also Early American Imprints.
- 19th Century Collections Online This link opens in a new windowA global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long 19th century. Content consists of monographs, newspapers, manuscripts, pamphlets, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, etc. in both Western and non-Western languages.
- Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new windowFull text of over 250,000 poems, mostly in English, but also including poems in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Information about and citations from thousands more poems, plus biographies of poets and analyses of poems.