Literature Research Guide

For help with your research, visit the reference desk (hours) on the second floor of Barnard Library, or contact a Barnard reference librarian:
     Phone: 212.854.3953
     Chat: IM BarnardReference
     E-mail: refdesk@barnard.edu
     Request a research consultation

Women 12 by Kuniyoshi Utagawa. Public domain.

Databases | E-Journals | Web | Reference| Bibliography

ONLINE DATABASES

Below is a selective list of databases for literary research. Comprehensive list.

Arts & Humanities Citation Index
Early English Books Online Digital facsimile images of most books published in English and the English-speaking world prior to 1700
Gender Studies Database
Humanities Full Text
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
JSTOR: the Scholarly Journal Archive
LION: Literature Online
Literature Criticism Online Especially valuable for contemporaneous commentary
MLA Bibliography
Project Muse : scholarly journals online
ProQuest Direct Multidisciplinary

E-JOURNALS

If you have a particular journal that you want to access electronically, enter the title in CLIO. In the Quick Limit box below the Enter Search field, select Electronic Journals/Newspapers, the click Search. If we have an online subscription or database access, one or more links will be provided in the record. You might also try the Citation Finder.

REFERENCE

Reference Resources: Print and Online
Use for:

topic overview

background information

bibliographies

Title Call Number

Gale Literary Index

WordNet free online lexicon (i.e. dictionary) from Princeton. Search page.

American Women Writers PS147 .A4

American Writers PS129 .A55

British Writers PR85 .B688

Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism (CMLC) PN681.5 .C57

Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC) PN771 .C59

Critical Survey of Poetry PN1021 .C7 2002

Dictionary of Feminist Theory HQ1115 .H86 1995

Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) PS129 .D5

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History E185 .E54 1996

Encyclopedia of American Literature PS21 .E53 1999

Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory PN98 .W64 E53 1997

Identities and Issues in Literature PS153 .M56 I34 1997

Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 (LC) PN86 .L56

Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC) PN761 .N56

Poetry Criticism (PC) PN1010 .P499

Short Story Criticism (SSC) PN3373 .S56

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (TCLC) PN771 .G27

Searching CLIO

CLIO (Columbia Libraries Information Online) is the on-line catalog for materials added to the Columbia University Libraries since 1981.

Use CLIO to find books, journals, links to online journals, and other materials, in the Columbia or Barnard libraries

For an author search, put last name, then first name

You can limit to books in the Barnard library using the Pre-set limits or Post Limit option

Finding commentaries or criticism of an author's works: do a Subject search for the name of the author and look for the subdivision Criticism and interpretation:
e.g. A subject search for "Hurston Zora Neale" finds a list of subject headings which includes
      Hurston, Zora Neale--Bibliography
      Hurston, Zora Neale--Biography
      Hurston, Zora Neale--Criticism and interpretation
      Hurston, Zora Neale--Political and social views

Call numbers for literature and literary criticism start with P. Books that are entirely about a particular author are shelved next to works by that author. For criticism on an author, find the correct call number for the author and look on the shelf near it.

Other Library Catalogs
Those with Columbia ID have access to the libraries of the Columbia Law School, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Teachers' College, and Union Theological Seminary, but their holdings are not included in CLIO.

CUID also provides access to the libraries of New York University. Anyone who lives, works, or goes to school in New York is entitled to a New York Public Library card. Use the Catalogs list on CU LibraryWeb, or the following links:

ALEPH for the Jewish Theological Seminary

BobCatPlus for NYU libraries

CATNYP for New York Public Library research libraries.

EDUCAT for Teachers College Library

Pegasus for Columbia Law Library

WorldCat a catalog of catalogs, has holdings from libraries all over the world

BIBLIOGRAPHY RESOURCES

RefWorks and EndNote are bibliographic software packages that are available, free of charge, to all current Barnard and Columbia students, faculty and staff.

Bibliographic software allows you to

search for citations in library catalogs and databases from the software or export results into it from remote catalogs and databases

store the citations

search through the citations you have stored using keywords

cite them in papers and bibliographies using any citation format you choose

Consult the page Refworks and EndNote at Barnard and Columbia for more details.

The Bedford Handbook is a free online guide to APA, Chicago, CSE, and MLA styling.

WEB SITES

Barnard and Columbia Guides

Collections of free e-Books and other texts

General

A Celebration of Women Writers Texts by and information about women writers
EServer.org Information in a variety of categories, including cultural theory, drama, feminism, poetry, race, etc.
The Internet Public Library: Literary Criticism
Literary Resources on the Net
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online A Web companion to the Norton Anthology, includes annotated texts from the Middle Ages, the Sixteenth Century, the Early Seventeenth Century, the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Age, and the 20th century
Poetry Foundation Full text of Poetry magazine from 1998-present and index to earlier issues. Poetry Tool for finding information about poems and poets.
Representative Poetry Online full text from over a thousand years of English-language poetry
Turning the Pages Digitized rare books from the British Library
Voice of the Shuttle includes materials on creative writing, drama, fiction, literature, poetry, etc.

Classical See the Library's Classics Research Guide

English Literature

Medieval, 5th to 15th Centuries

The Age of King Charles V 1,000 Illuminations from the Biblioth�que Nationale de France Department of Manuscripts
Beowulf in Hypertext
Dartmouth Dante Project
The Electronic Introduction to Old English
Internet Medieval Sourcebook
The Labyrinth
Luminarium: Medieval Period
Middle English Compendium Contains a Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, related resources.
New Chaucer Society also Chaucer Bibliography Online and The World of Chaucer medieval books and manuscripts exhibition.
ORB: The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies Includes The ORB Encyclopedia, a chronological and geographical index of essays, images, links, and other resources; The ORB Reference Shelf, and other resources.
Teams Middle English Texts

Renaissance through Restoration, 15th through early 18th Centuries

The Aphra Behn Page
The Edward Spenser Home page
Google Books: Shakespeare Also Google Scholar, Video, and Images.
Luminarium: the Renaissance
The Milton-L Homepage
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet
Renaissance Electronic Texts

Romantic, late 18th/early 19th Centuries

British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-0832
Romantic Chronology
Romantic Circles Provides critical essays, indices, etc., as well as a searchable archive of "innovative, hypertext editions of Romantic works."

Victorian, 19th Century

Illuminated Books: a Free Access Digital Library of Illuminated Books "mainly from the 19th Century Victorian Period, Arts and Craft style and Private Presses extending from 1800's to the 1920's."
Victorian Research Web
The Victorian Web is a scholarly encyclopedia on the literature and culture of the period, and includes a hypertext index of the era's major writers and thinkers.
The Victorian Women Writers Project is an electronic collection of texts by British women writers of the late Victorian period.

Modernist

An Internet Bibliography of Virginia Woolf
The James Joyce Scholars Collection full-text digitized editions of out-of-print scholarly critical monographs on Joyce

American Literature

Early American

Early Americas Digital Archive a "collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820"
Witchcraft Archives

Realism and Naturalism, 1800 to 1870