Research Guides: English and American Literature: English 101 resources

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Office: Bobst Library Mezzanine

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Subjects: Comparative Literature, English Literature

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Welcome!

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:

Research Guides Homepage

Finding Books at Bobst

BobCat

To find books at Bobst, search BobCat, our library catalog.

A few steps:

Check the status of an item. Generally, Available means that the copy is in the library and can be checked out (excluding Reference materials).
Note the call number, not the ISBN number. The call number (ex. HT261.4.T5 1998) is what you use to locate the book.
Consult the directory in the elevator to figure out which floor your item is on.

Using databases for literature research

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 Articles & Databases tab from the main NYU Libraries website; note that we have a longer list of databases for English literature listed there.

For more guidance, see the Finding Articles via Databases section of this guide.

MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) This link opens in a new window
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The MLA International Bibliography provides bibliographic records for books, book chapters, journal articles, and dissertations published in the fields of modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Full text is available for some articles. The MLAIB covers items published from around 1920 to the present.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author.
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies 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)
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Literature Resource Center offers biographical and other background information for research on literary topics, authors, and their works. Its coverage includes all genres and disciplines, all time periods, and all regions of the world. Literature Resource Center's content comes from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and more, including full text of selected poems, plays, and short stories.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
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Provides full-text access to high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from scholarly publishers.

Using the MLA International Bibliography

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.

MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
The MLA International Bibliography provides bibliographic records for books, book chapters, journal articles, and dissertations published in the fields of modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Full text is available for some articles. The MLAIB covers items published from around 1920 to the present.

Using NYU Special Collections

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.

English 101 presentation slides

English 101 library visit slides, fall 2023
Slides from the Fall 2023 English 101 library session.