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Wellesley College Library catalog
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WorldCat
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  Find background information

General Biographies, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Concordances

American National Biography
Lengthy biographical articles on many American authors.

Bloomsbury guide to women's literature. (Clapp Ref PN471 .B57 1992)

Britannica Online

Cambridge History of English and American Literature:An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes
(via Bartleby.com) Essay topics range from poetry, fiction, drama and essays to history, theology and political writing. The set encompasses a wide selection of writing on orators, humorists, poets, newspaper columnists, religious leaders, economists, Native Americans, song writers, and even non-English writing, such as Yiddish and Creole.

Concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms

eChaucer: Chaucer in the Twenty-First Century

European writers. (Clapp Ref q PN501 .E9 1983)

Feminist companion to literature in English : women writers from the Middle Ages to the present. (Clapp Ref PR113 .F45 1990)

Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples
By Robert Harris of Vanguard University.

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
An overview of the major landmarks of criticism from classical antiquity to the present day.

Middle English Compendium
Access to three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Topics such as postmodernism, deconstruction and post-colonialism.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
An illustrated collection of more than 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past, from the fourth century BC to the year 2001. Note that only one person at a time can access this database. If you can't get in, try again in a few minutes.

Oxford English Dictionaryand AskOxford.com
Everything and anything about words.

Oxford Reference Online--Literature
Search a selection of Oxford dictionaries of literature.

Reader's Guide to Literature in English. (Clapp Ref PR85 .R42 1996)

WordHoard is another electronic concordance containing "the entire canon of Early Greek epic in the original & in translation, as well as all of Chaucer & Shakespeare, & Spenser's Fairie Queene." [Note: It needs to be downloaded].

American Literature

Modern American Women Writers. (Clapp Ref PS151 .M54 1991)

African-American Writers. (Clapp Ref PS153.N5 A344 1991)

Oxford Companion to African-American Literature. (Clapp Ref PS153 .N5 O96 1997)

Encyclopedia of American Literature. (Clapp Ref PS21 .E53 1999)

Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. (Clapp Ref PS21 .R4)

British Literature

British Women Writers. (Clapp Ref PR111 .B75 1989)

The Oxford Companion to English Literature

Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. (Clapp Ref PR447 .O93 1999)

Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. (Clapp Ref PR871 .S87 1989)

Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion. (Clapp Ref PR881 .K39 1997)

Shakespeare

A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. (Clapp Ref q PR2892 .S6)

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

Shakespeare A-Z. (Clapp Ref PR2892 .B69 1990)

Shakespeare's Language. (Clapp Ref PR3072 .K47 2000)

Who's Who in Shakespeare. (Clapp Ref PR2892 .S76 1992)

Literary Criticism and Theory

A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. (Clapp Ref PN41 .C83 1998)

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
"The authoritative and evenhanded reference to the intellectual traditions of literary theory from the margins to the mainstream."

Poetry 

Critical Survey of Poetry. 8 vols. (Clapp Ref PN 1021 C7 2003)--a great starting point, providing analyses and development of the poet's work with brief discussions of specific poems. Excellent annotated bibliography.

Encyclopedia of American Poetry (Clapp Ref PS316 .E53 1998)

Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. (Clapp Ref PN1021 .N39 1993)

Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms. (Clapp Ref PN1042 .P75 1986)

Find articles and essays

Academic Search Premier The world's largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database. Dates of coverage vary by title ·

America: History and Life 1954-
Use this to find articles about American history in all languages.

Arts and Humanities Search (AH Search) 1980-
Use this to find articles, with their lists of cited references, in arts and humanities journals.

Historical Abstracts 1954- Use this to find articles about non-American history in all languages.

Humanities Full Text via WilsonWeb 1984- Check the box for "Humanities Full Text." Note: this database is a mixture of citations and full text, despite its name. Use this to find English-language articles about literature, film, and drama.

JSTOR
Use this to find articles in selected scholarly literature journals (ELH,MLN, African American Review, Shakespeare Quarterly,etc.) written prior to about the last five years. JSTOR is an archive of back issues of selected journals.

Literature Online (LION)
In addition to biographical information and online texts of poems and books, LION also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature 1920-1999 (ABELL). ABELL covers monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards. All aspects and periods of English literature are covered, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. British, American and Commonwealth writing are all represented.

Literature Resource Center Biographies, bibliographies and full-text critical analysis of authors from all genres and eras, including the contents of Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism.

MLA Bibliography 1963-
Use this to find articles about language, literature, film, and drama in all languages.

Project Muse
Use this to find articles in selected scholarly literature journals (SEL, Modern Fiction Studies, MLN, ELH, American Literature, etc.) written in the last two to five years.

Times of London Digital Archive, 1785-1985
Search for book reviews and other articles by or about British and colonial authors.

Twentieth-Century Short Story Explication. (Clapp Ref Z5917 .S5 W35 1993)

Other databases may be useful for you, depending on your specific topic and approach. AskUs for some customized suggestions.

Find Classic Books Online

Download the classics from Google Book Search. The site contains a diverse collection of public domain titles.

Find Book Reviews

Check Book Review Index Online Plus for reviews from 1965 on and Book Review Digest Plus for reviews from 1983 on.

Find Plays

Asian American Drama.
This edition of Asian American Drama contains 186 plays by 35 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.

Index to One Act Plays. 1924 --1964. (Clapp Ref 5781 L83)

Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections. (Clapp Ref Z5781 O8 1988).

Play Index. 1949-1997. (Clapp Ref q Z5781 .P53)

Find Poems

American Periodical Verse. 1971-. (Clapp Ref Z 1231 P7 I47).

Granger's Index to Poetry. (Clapp Ref PN1022 .G7 1982)

Hoffman's Index to Poetry: European and Latin American Poetry in Anthologies. (Clapp Ref PN1022 .H627 1985)

Last Lines. (Clapp Ref PN1022 .K55 1991)

Find Short Stories

Short Story Index. (Clapp Ref Z5917 .S5 C62)

 Go to a guide tailored for your class

Additional Internet Links

For Web pages devoted to specific authors, start from one of the comprehensive sites below or use your favorite search engine and type in the author's name. Keep a critical eye on the quality of the sites!

American Comparative Literature Association
Is the principal learned society in the United States for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures as well as the premises of cross-cultural literary study itself. This site mostly offers an opportunity to explore what is happening professionally in this field.

American Verse Project
From the University Of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative and the University of Michigan Press. A searchable archive of mostly pre-1920 American poetry.

BBC Audio Interviews
Hear interviews with poets (ranging from Maya Angelou to William Butler Yeats) and writers (ranging from Chinua Achebe to Virginia Woolf)

British Women Romantic Poets, 1789 --1832.
An electronic collection of texts from the Shields Library, University of California at Davis. Includes poetry by British and Irish women written (but not necessarily published) between 1789 and 1832.

Celebration of Women Writers
An exhaustive (or exhausting!) list of women writers, from classic to trashy. Searchable by author's name, century, country, or ethnicity. The information/links vary in quality.

Department of English Links
By John Lye, Brock Univesity. A good selection of Web sites, including genre collections and creative writing.

Middle English Compendium
Access to three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.

Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet
Maintained by Terry Gray at Palomar College. Includes works, criticism, theater, life and times, etc.

Ploughshares
The literary journal at Emerson College. Over 2,750 poems, stories, and articles from the current issue and the archives may be read for free. Also, a multitude of Web-only information about many of the 2,000-plus authors: bios, news, events, even blurbs about their favorite books.

Poetry Archive.
Provides links to poets reading their own works. The president of the Poetry Archive is Seamus Heaney

poets.org
The Academy of American Poets' Web site.

Romanticism on the Net
Is an international refereed electronic journal devoted to British Romantic studies.

Shakespeare in Quarto
On this site you will find the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.

thepoetryfoundation.org
Home of Poetry magazine, this is an enormous resource for all things poetry.

Victorian Web
The "authors section" of this site is maintained by George P. Landow from the National University of Singapore and Brown University. Excellent overview of an author in Victorian times, including political, religious, and social contexts.

Victorian Women Writers Project
The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century.

Voice of the Shuttle: English Literature
By Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara. An excellent, comprehensive Web site for all periods of English and American literature, with links to specific author pages, listservs and newsgroups, teaching resources, syllabi, and conferences.

Wired for Books
From the Ohio University Telecommunications Center. Includes audio interviews by Don Swaim of CBS radio of many famous writers from the popular to the poetic. There are also clips of modern writers reading their work.

WSSLinks: Women and Gender Studies: Literature and Culture Web Sites
A high-quality list of Web sites maintained by Marlene Manoff at MIT.

Contact the departmental Library liaison

For help with your research, or to schedule a library research session for your class, contact Jacqueline Fitzpatrick library research liaison to English.

To discuss acquiring particular resources, contact Steve Smith, library collections liaison to English.

The staff members above work together to support the needs of the English department.   

  Go to related Wellesley College academic departments

English Department

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• Wellesley College Library
• Date created: February 14, 2001
• Date Modified: December 20, 2007
• Expires: June 30, 2008