Research Guides: HP 326: Music and the Arts: Literature

Databases

Library databases have access to articles from journals, magazines, and newspapers. Every database has different content. This makes it important to use a database that has content on the subject you are researching. In addition, be sure to search in more than one database to find information.

Check out these recommended databases to get started:

Bloom's Literature
Scholarly works exploring great writers, important works, memorable characters, and influential movements and events in world literature.
This resource contains more than 20,000 critical essays from over 500 literary journals and 2,300 scholarly and critical books, including 700 titles published by Bloom's Literary Criticism and Facts On File. Also included in the database are more than 13,000 biographies, 45,000 character entries, 5,000 synopses of literary works and hundreds of images and videos.
Literary Reference Center
Scholarly journals, work and topic overviews, biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. All full-text articles.
Funded by the New Jersey State Library.
Credo Reference
This multidisciplinary online reference library provides access to a selection of 601 reference books and 3,412,690 entries.
Credo Reference also includes cross-references to other full text titles containing related information.
Academic Search Premier
A scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 4,770 full-text journals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals.
This multi-disciplinary database offers an enormous collection of the most valuable full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. It includes more than 13,780 indexed and abstracted journals and provides full-text for 4,770 journals, including full-text for 4,000 peer-reviewed titles. You will find PDF backfiles to 1975 or further as well as searchable cited references for more than 1,050 journals. This database is an excellent source of peer-reviewed, full-text for STEM research, as well as for the Social Sciences and Humanities.
JSTOR
JSTOR's archival journal collections include more than two thousand journals dating as far back as 1665. Multidisciplinary and discipline-specific journal and ebook collections are offered, covering more than 50 academic disciplines in the Humanities, Life Sciences, and Social Sciences.

Suggested Books

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia by Bruce Murphy
Call Number: REF PN41 .B4 1996
ISBN: 9780062701107
Publication Date: 1996
This encyclopedia includes over 10,000 articles on literary movements throughout the ages, as well as summaries of important works and biographies of poets, playwrights, and novelists.

These reference books will help you get started with your research.

Literature and Its Times by Joyce Moss; George Wilson
Call Number: REF PN50 .L574 1997
ISBN: 0787606103
Publication Date: 1997
This five-volume encyclopedia explores the historical context of 300 novels, plays, poems, speeches and short stories from ancient Greece to the present.
World Poets by Ron Padgett (Editor)
Call Number: REF PN1021 .W67 2000
ISBN: 068480591X
Publication Date: 2000
This reference book includes essays on more than 100 prominent poets, as well as 15 essays on genres and historic periods.
Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Contexts, 1500-2000 by Peter Widdowson
Call Number: EBOOK
ISBN: 0333792173
Publication Date: 2004
"This comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context of English literature covers the core periods of literature, and history, from the English Renaissance to the present (1500 to 2000). It introduces and outlines key terms, concepts and developments and provides a series of timelines showing political, social, cultural and literary events for each year." (Credo Reference)

Off Campus Access

You don't have to be in the Library to access articles and databases.

The Library's resources can be accessed anytime, anywhere with your NetID and password.