ENGL 2599: Monstrous Forms

This guide was created for students in the ENGL 2599 section Monstrous Forms. This page includes resources to help get you started with your research on your chosen text and topic for your third essay assignment. Need more help? Contact Sherri. 

See the Books and Ebooks tab for examples of electronic and print books that talk about monsters and the monstrous. We have streaming monster films too! 

See the grammar, style, and citation tab for general grammar and style guides and resources for help creating citations and bibliographies.

The Tools for Access tab includes several tools to help you access library content from anywhere in the world. 

Your third paper will require outside research in addition to your close reading. In preparation, you will want to start thinking about possible questions/topics of interest related to the topic you have chosen. 

You will also want to spend some time thinking about how you will conduct your research. 

• Fine-tune your searches.
  Think broadly when brainstorming search terms. What synonyms or related terms could stand in for your key search terms?
  You can combine search terms using AND ("Frankenstein's monster" AND ethics) and look for synonyms using OR (zombie OR undead). Place terms you want to be searched as a phrase in quotation marks " ". 
  In many databases, the asterisk (*) is a truncation or "wildcard" symbol  that will match all possible endings for a word stem.  For example, ethic* will match ethics, ethical, ethically, ethicist, etc. 
  Most databases have filters or facets that allow you to narrow your results by subject, date range, etc. Limit your searches to help you find the sources you need. 
   
• Think about where you might find the type of information you are seeking.​
  Will you find the research you need in an e-book? An article? A newspaper? A documentary? An interview? For this assignment, you will likely be mostly looking for journal articles and/or essays/chapters from books. In general, though, when conducting research, cast a wide net when looking for the types of resources that could help answer your research question or support an argument you are making. 
   
• Know the difference between academic and non-academic sources, and when it's appropriate to use them.
  Most databases allow you to limit results to academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed sources. Be mindful of your assignment and what you're being asked to provide. Need a refresher? Watch the short video Peer Review in 3 Minutes.
   
• When you find a good source, use it to find other good sources. 
  Use the subject terms and keywords associated with an item to find other items on similar topics. Scholarly books and articles will have works cited, bibliographies, or footnotes you can mine for additional resources. 

Need help? Ask a librarian.  

The UVA Library has access to over 1000 databases. Below are a few that might be useful for researching your text and topic of choice related to the monstrous.

MLA International Bibliography indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations. For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries,” or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog.

JSTOR provides access to millions of journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Good for content that is more than 3-5 years old. 

Project 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. 

Academic Search Complete is a large general database of articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers on many topics. Also includes reference books, biographies, speeches, images, and other primary source documents.

ProQuest One Literature  is for scholars who want to engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research. 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, theater performances, and author readings.

Humanities International Complete Indexes over 2000 journals with full text for over 700 and for books and other publications. Topics covered include archaeology, art, dance, drama, ethnic and women's studies, history, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, religion.