English 2400/4420: Anglophone Africana Literature & Africana Womanism

Prof.: Clenora Hudson Weems
Librarians: Anne Barker & Rachel Brekhus

Background Information

The Gale Virtual Reference Library provides electronic access to an array of specialized encyclopedias, including The Encyclopedia of Black Studies, The Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, The Encyclopedia of African American Society, The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, and many others.

Oxford Reference Online Premium provides similar quick reference works.

LION: Literature Online also provides access to a variety of authoritative web sites and the electronic version of reference books such as The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, The Encyclopedia of the Novel, and others.

Criticism

Criticism may be published in books or as articles in journals.

Use the MERLIN and MOBIUS catalogs to locate books of criticism about an author or topic.
A subject search may give more control and organization, but a keyword search may find more specific items.

Here are examples of subject headings that might be relevant for this class:

Walker, Alice
African American authors -- Biography
African American women -- History -- 19th century --Bibliography.
African Americans -- Biography -- History and criticism.
African Americans in literature - Dictionaries
American literature -- African American authors -- Bibliography.
American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism
Race in literature.

If you haven't found enough, use WorldCat to search libraries throughout North America.

Finding criticism in journal articles is usually a two step process.
1) Use databases and indexes to identify articles.
2) If the full text of the article is not provided in the database, click on . This will guide you to full text elsewhere, to the online catalog to see if we have a print copy, or to ILL@MU to request email delivery of a copy from elsewhere.

The major literary database is LION: Literature Online, which includes
MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and  Literatures
and
ABELL: Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature

Supplement searches in LION with searches in additional databases:
Academic Search Premier

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)
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (Ref. PN94 .T88)
Contemporary Literary Criticism (Ref. PN779 .C6)
Poetry Criticism (Ref. PN1010 .P499)
Short Story Criticism (Ref. PN3373 .S386)

Alternative and minority publications are not always well represented in the major databases. Use these indexes to hear these voices.
Alternative Press Index
GenderWatch
Index to Black Periodicals (1942--) Ref. AI3 .I552 -- Earlier volumes, including title changes, are in the circulating stacks.
Women Studies Abstracts (1972--) Ref. Z7962 .W65