Research Guides: Essays and Essayists: Finding Criticism

Using Library of Congress Subject Headings to find Criticism in the Catalog

Subject headings are words and phrases which constitute a "controlled vocabulary" to categorize books by subject field. Subject headings often indicate the contents of books in general terms not found in the title. Subject headings in online databases are often referred to as descriptors, but they serve the same purpose in locating valuable resources. Using a "keyword" search will identify catalog entries that contain those specific terms which can add value to a search; however, the terms can be found anywhere - author, notes, publisher, etc. - therefore there is no indication of the value of the term(s) as content matter of the items in a results list.

Use general subject headings for searching a broad topic or more specific subject headings for a specific text, film, or play. You will find (more) headings specific to the subject category within the left-hand facets in the Libraries' online catalog. If you want to see the subject headings for a specific title, click on the "details" link in the title record.

Critical works are classified and sorted by author's name, dates of birth and death, and the subheading, Criticism and Interpretation. Here are some examples:

Danticat, Edwidge, 1969- -- Criticism and interpretation
Didion, Joan -- Criticism and interpretation

Literary Criticism via General / Multi-Disciplinary databases

Humanities Source This link opens in a new window
Humanities Source includes full text access to journals. It combines various Humanities related databases, including the American Humanities Index.
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.
Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text and full-image access to hundreds of journals published in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and areas of general popular interest. Each periodical is covered back to its first issue, regardless of when it began publication. International in scope, PAO covers periodicals in a number of Western languages.
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.
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Central is a large, multidisciplinary database with over 11,000 titles, with over 8,000 titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all markets. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.

Literary Criticism via Subject Specific databases

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) This link opens in a new window
The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) indexes scholarship in the fields of English language and literature, folklore, and English-language film and television studies.
Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window
Literature Criticism Online includes the contents of several multidisciplinary series, including Contemporary Literary Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. The collection includes biographical essays and selected literary criticism for authors from the classical period to the present day.
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.
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.
Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive (TLS) This link opens in a new window
The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive contains every page of every copy of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) published from 1902 to 2011. The database is searchable by author or contributor; the identities of the contributors to the TLS who were published anonymously until 1974 are disclosed for the first time and augmented by biographical sketches.

Database Search Tips

Here are some tips for better search results in databases.

This usage works on most databases, but check 'Help' sections for supported search syntax.

Boolean: (using operators: and, or, not)

mother AND father searches for occurrences of both words within scope defined.
mother OR father searches for one or all, but both are not required.
mother NOT father searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father.’
(mother NOT father) AND god searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father,’ then also requires the word ‘god.’

Truncation:

art* (asterisk as truncation character) searches for art, arts, artistic, artful, etc.

Wildcard:

m?n (question mark as wildcard character) searches for man and men.

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