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If you're taking English 101 at NYU, this page is designed to introduce you to some of the resources you'll use most often. Feel free to explore the rest of this guide for a sense of what other tools and materials the NYU Libraries have to offer. And if you find this guide useful, remember that we have library research guides for many subjects. Check them out here:
For books and other full-length materials, plus some articles and ebook chapters, start your research with the library catalog, accessible via the Libraries' home page or the "Research" tab in NYU Home.
Need help using the catalog? Try these guides and tutorials created by the NYU Libraries:
Library databases help you find online content that the NYU Libraries subscribe to. Below are some of the databases you'll find most useful for literature research. You can get to these and other databases via the Databases tab from the main NYU Libraries website; note that you can use the "Subjects" dropdown menu to see list of databases for English literature.
For more guidance, see the Finding Articles via Databases section of this guide.
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature. Resources included in this database are: Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story, Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Encyclopedia of African Literature, Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003, Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.), Encyclopedia of the Novel, Handbook of African American Literature, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, Penguin Classics Introductions, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition), Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
This video, created by the editors of the MLA International Bibliography, offers a three-minute introduction to the MLAIB. Closed captioning is available through the Vimeo platform. No transcript is available.
This video is one of many MLA International Bibliography tutorials available on the MLA's own website.
NYU's Special Collections Center, located on the second floor of Bobst Library, houses rare, unique, and historic materials, including the Fales Library of British and American Literature. See the Special Collections section of this guide for more details.
