Skip to Main Content

Latinx Literature and Culture - C19 and Beyond - English Resources

Resources mainly in English for students in Carmen Lamas' spring 2022 ENGL 8570 class.

Research Guide

This guide will provide you with some suggestions of where to look for sources, mainly in English, that focus on Latinx culture and literature of the 19th century and beyond. The other tabs in this guide may be useful for guidance on citing works and tools for making off-Grounds access to our resources easier.

Library databases - Reference

Oxford Bibliographies Online offer topic bibliographies related to a variety of subjects. We own access to the full Latino Studies guide (including a bibliography by Dr. Lamas on nineteenth-century literature). You may also find helpful information on the Latin American Studies guide, although we do not currently subscribe to that module, so only some information is available. Other guides include: African Studies, African-American Studies, Anthropology, Atlantic History, Art History, Buddhism, Classics, Criminology, Hinduism, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Literary and Critical Theory, Medieval Studies, Music, Renaissance & Reformation bibliographies, and British and Irish Literature modules.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature includes a subject area of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures that contains 100 entries on a wide variety of topics, including 16 marked as related -- at least in part -- to the 19th century. 

Cambridge Core Latin American Literature collection of ebooks includes access to resources such as The Cambridge History of Latina/o American LiteratureThe Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (3 vols), The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature. The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry as well as titles more specific to particular countries, authors, and topics. 

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History includes hundreds of articles covering a wide range of topics related to Latin American history from 1492 and before to current times. The articles are peer-reviewed, and regularly updated. Use the browse by subject feature to browse by time period or topic. 

Library databases - Scholarly criticism on literature and culture

The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages. If a literary study of your novel or work exists, you will likely find it here. Not everything in the MLA Bibliography is full-text, meaning that you may only see a description of an article, rather than the text of the article. To get full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog. If the citation is for a book or an essay/chapter in a book, look for the book title in Virgo. 

ProQuest One Literature contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, and dissertations. It also includes more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings.

The Chicano Database this bibliographic index covers a wide range of materials focused on the Mexican-American and Chicano experience, with broader Latino experience of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and Central American immigrants from 1992 onwards.

JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals, from their beginnings to 3-5 years ago, so this may be another good database to look for articles related to your novel or work. Articles in JSTOR should be full-text, if we subscribe to the journal. 

Project MUSE includes searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and more, mostly from North American university presses. 

Example Print and Ebooks

Virgo is UVA Library's catalog. Search Virgo for scholarship about particular authors or topics related to Latinx literature 

Make sure to note relevant subject heading that relates to your topic of interest, and use the subject headings to help you identify other items of interest.

Can't find books in Virgo? You can also broaden your search to other libraries by searching in WorldCat (OCLC) - WorldCat includes millions of records of items held by libraries in the U.S. and internationally, and can be useful in identifying books not held in the UVA Library collection. Once identified, you can order material through InterLibrary Loan Borrowing.

Below are a few examples of print books and ebooks that critically examine Latinx literature of the 19th century.