LibGuides: Literary Criticism: Resources to Use

Shirley Jackson

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

DH Lawrence

Rachel Carson

Background Information / Reference

Literary Reference Source This link opens in a new window
Contains a collection of author biographies, plot summaries & work overviews, full-text essays, literary reference books & monographs, literary magazines & journals, poems from hundreds of sources, short stories, classic texts, author interviews, and much more.

Literary Criticism: Databases

Start with these databases to find literary criticism, authors' bios, lists of literary works, and plot summaries.

Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Literature Resource Center is an online literature database offering literature criticism, biographies of authors, multimedia resources (websites, podcasts, audio files) plot summaries and other topics, book reviews, and primary sources about the literature searched for.
Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window
Gale Literature brings together Gale's literary databases in a new digital environment. Contains bibliographies, primary sources, biographies, literature criticism, news & reviews of a piece of literature.
Literature (Gale) This link opens in a new window
Gale Literature is an online database that collects Gale's literary databases, supporting researchers at all levels to search across materials through a single interface.
Currently, users can search these collections with Gale Literature:
- Gale Literature Criticism
- Gale Literature Resource Center
- LitFinder
- Subcollections of eBook titles
- Dictionary of Literary Biography
- Something About the Author
- Contemporary Authors

General Databases Covering Literature

Use these databases to find more general information about literary works, book reviews, authors' bios and contextual information.

Essay and General Literature Index (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new window
Contains citations to essays and articles on the humanities and social sciences. These essays are found in collections of essays and miscellaneous works published in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.
Short Story Index (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new window
Detailed indexing of more than 117 000 stories from more than 4 200 collections and anthologies

Other Disciplines

Sometimes articles from scholarly journals in other disciplines can inform the critical writing you do on literary works. Below are links to some databases from other fields which may provide useful articles.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The journals archived in JSTOR span many disciplines.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
This database covers many subjects found at colleges and universities. Contains articles from thousands of journals, magazines, news sources, and videos from the Associated Press.

Developing Keywords

Created by University of Houston Libraries

Peer Review Explained

Created by NCSU Library