English 2100 Writing About Literature: Romantic Women, 1759-1817

Instructor: Jonas Cope
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.
• Romantic Circles
• Romantic Links, Electronic Texts, and Home Pages
• Voice of the Shuttle: Romantics
• Literary Resources - Romantic
• Chawton House Library and Early Women's Writing
• British Women Playwrights Around 1800
• Dictionary of Sensibility
• Nineteenth-century British women writers : a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook (PR115 .N55 2000)
• The Cambridge companion to British romanticism (PR457 .C33 1993)
• Encyclopedia of British writers (Ref. PR19 .E63 2003)
• An Oxford companion to the romantic age
• Encyclopedia of the romantic era, 1760-1850 (Ref. NX452.5.R64 E53 2004)
• The Cambridge companion to the Eighteenth-Century novel (PR851 .C36 1996)
• A Companion to Romanticism (PR457 .C58 1998)

 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.

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.
  • Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Ref. PN761.N5)
  • Literature Criticism, from 1400-1800 (Ref. PN80.L57)
  • Poetry Criticism (Ref. PN1010 .P499)
• 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)
• International Index to Periodicals (1907-1965) (Ref. AI3.R49)
• Historical Abstracts covers world history 1450-present, excluding the U.S. and Canada.
• GenderWatch covers Women's 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 Historical Context

• The Index to English Literary Periodicals indexes articles published in early English journals and magazines contained in the microfilm set English Literary Periodicals 1681-1914
  Note: This Index is a work in progress, so you may also want to use the guide Accessing English Literary Periodicals ( SPEC-R PN5124.P4 A25 1981). See also the Chronological Listing of Periodicals by Decade.
• C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
• Index to book reviews in England, 1775-1800 (Z1035.A1 F672 1997)
• The Romantics reviewed; contemporary reviews of British Romantic writers (Ref. PR590 .R43)
• Literary reviews in British periodicals, 1789-1797 (Ref. PR442 .W336 1979)
• Literary reviews in British periodicals, 1798-1820 (Ref. PR451 .W36 1972)
• Literary reviews in British periodicals, 1821-1826 (Depository Z2013 .W36 1977)
• ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online provides the full text of works published in England in the 18th century.
• 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.
• British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832
• The Bluestocking Archive
• Corvey Women Writers on the Web, 1796-1834
• 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 16th cent* and marriage
  • include in your search s: early works and nth cent* e.g., s: early works and 16th 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.
• 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