English 2100 Writing About Literature: Nineteenth-Century British Authors

Instructor: Karen Laird
Librarian: Anne Barker

Background Resources

• LION Reference includes a selection of literary reference works.
• The Gale Virtual Reference Library provides specialized online encyclopedias for background information.
• Oxford Reference Online Premier provides concise reference sources.
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Ref. DA28 .O95 2004) 
• Dictionary of Literary Biography (Ref. PN451 .D43) indexed by the Literary Index.
• Encyclopedia of British Writers (Ref. PR19.E63 2003)
• Oxford Chronology of English Literature (Ref. DA28.O95 2004)
• Literary Gazeteer of England (Ref. PR109.F5)

Finding Books

• The MERLIN catalog shows materials in the MU Libraries.
• The MOBIUS catalog shows materials from Missouri academic libraries.
• WorldCat shows materials from many libraries worldwide.
• Google Book Search provides fulltext access to older books (usually pre-1925) and indexes many more recent books.

To find information about an author, search the author's name, last name first, as a subject.
To find background on the historical conditions of authors' lives, try some of these subject headings:

• England social conditions 19th century
• England social life and customs 19th century
• Great Britain history 19th century
• Great Britain social conditions 19th century
• Great Britain social life and customs 19th century
• London England social life and customs 19th century
• Books and Reading England History 19th century

Finding Articles

Use these databases to identify articles on your topic:

• MLA International Bibliography is the main bibliography for the study of languages and literatures.
• LION: Literature Online
  • Choose Criticism & Reference from the sidebar.
  • Choose Criticism to search both the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) and the full text of 250+ core journals.
  • Choose Reference to search a variety of literary encyclopedias and handbooks.
  • Choose Web Sites for a select collection of links.
• The Literary Index indexes the many Gale literature criticism sets. These books excerpt literary criticism from all periods on individual authors.
  • Dictionary of Literary Biography (Ref. PN451 .D43) 
  • Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Ref. PN761.N5)
  • Poetry Criticism (Ref. PN1010 .P499)
  • Short Story Criticism (Ref. PN3373 .S386 )
  • Twenieth-Century Literary Criticism (Ref. PN94 .T88) 
• Academic Search Premier inddexes the core journals in all fields.
• Academic OneFile competes with Academic Search Premier, indexing another selection of journals.
• The Reader's Guide Retrospective (1890-1982)
• Historical Abstracts covers world history 1450-present, excluding the U.S. and Canada.
• GenderWatch covers Women's and Gender Studies publications.
• Alternative Press Index provides access to alternative, radical, and left periodicals.
• JSTOR is digital storage of long runs of significant journals. Good for very detailed searching.
• Project Muse is similar to JSTOR, but offers more recent coverage.

Click on to locate a copy of the article online, in the library, or through ILL@MU.

Finding Primary Sources

• C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
• ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• LION: Literature Online provides online texts of many English and American literary works with a search mechanism to facilitate text analysis.
  From the main LION menu, choose Search Texts to search for words and phrases within a specific work or group of works. The advanced search feature allows you to define a corpus by period, literary movement, author's gender or ethnicity, and other criteria.
• The Google Books project indexes thousands of books and allows viewing of books that are in the public domain, including most books published prior to 1925.
• Through MERLIN, using the advanced search option
  • limit by date
  • include in your search s: sources 
  • include in your search s: sources and nth cent* e.g., s: sources and 19th cent* and marriage
  • include in your search s: personal narratives

MERLIN lists not only printed books, but also links to electronic books, and many items contained in large microfilm collections. Microforms and the equipment needed to view, print, or scan the materials are found in Special Collections on the fourth floor West of Ellis Library. See the guide to the Microform Collection for detailed information on the microfilm sets, including some that are not analyzed in the MERLIN Catalog.

Finding Visual Resources

• ARTStor is an image library of over 500,000 images in all subject areas.
• CAMIO, the Catalog of Art Museum Images Online provides images licensed for educational purposes.
• Oxford Art Online
• British Library Images Online provides many useful images.
• Google Images can also be useful, although not as precise.

Resources for Short Fiction

Resources for Poetry