Finding Books at Barnard/Columbia

• Use CLIO to find books, journals, links to online journals, and other materials, in the Columbia or Barnard libraries.
• 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 "dickinson emily" finds a list of subject headings which includes
        Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Bibliography.
        Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Biography.
        Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Concordances.
        Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Criticism and interpretation.
• Call numbers for literature and literary criticism start with P (Overview of the Library of Congress Classification Outline).  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.

 Major Reference Works
 available in the Barnard Library Reference Area

Major Databases

Arts & Humanities Citation Index
Cited references and bibliographic information for the arts and humanities. Useful for tracing who cited a given article or book, or for tracing an idea.
Search Tips: Use General search to search for a topic, author or journal.  Use * for truncation.

Early English Books Online
Full-page images of most books published in English and the English-speaking world prior to 1700.
Search Tips: When searching, use ? for truncation (to find variant endings).

Gender Studies International
Citations for materials on women's studies, gender studies, feminist theory and criticism, from 1972 to the present. 
Search Tips: Use * for truncation.

Humanities Full Text
Citations for articles, book reviews, etc. in the humanities, from 1984 to the present.
Search Tips: Use " " for a phrase;  use * for truncation.

Iter
Citations for articles on the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700).
Search Tips: Select "Search a Database" then Iter Bibliography.
Phrase is assumed; use "and" if not a phrase; use ? for truncation.

JSTOR: the Scholarly Journal Archive
A full text database of scholarly journals, dating back to their first issues in most cases, but excluding the most recent 3-5 years.
Search Tips: Use the Advanced Search option.  If you don't narrow your search to Title or Abstract, the full text will be searched.
Select Language and Literature journals. 
Use " " for a phrase; use * for truncation.

LION: Literature Online
English and American poetry, drama, prose, biographies, and secondary sources, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the 20th century.
Search Tips: To find critical articles click on "Search criticism and reference." 
Phrase is assumed; use "and" if not a phrase; use * for truncation.

Literature Criticism Online
A reference database, comprised of 10 Gale encyclopedias, including Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Shakespeare Criticism (SC) and Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism (CMLC). Especially valuable for contemporaneous commentary.
Search Tips: Boolean and proximity searching (use N for next to); Wildcard truncation symbols are ? !*   Browse function is preferable to Search as there are variant forms of names [e.g., "Woolf, Virginia" and "Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia"].

MLA Bibliography
Citations for articles, dissertations, books, book chapters, etc. from 1963 to the present.  
Search Tips: Use " " for a phrase; use * for truncation.

Project Muse
Full-text articles from more than 100 scholarly journals published by university presses in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. 
Search Tips: Use " " for a phrase; use * for truncation.

ProQuest Direct
Online journal articles and citations, as well as the full text of the New York Times from 1857 to the present.
Search Tips: Select scholarly materials by clicking on "Databases selected" then select "Research Library." 
Two words phrases are assumed to be a phrase;  use " " for phrases of more than two words.  Use * for truncation.

Web Resources

Collections of E-Books and Other Texts Free on the Web

• Bibliomania
• Google Scholar (includes books from Google Books)
• The Internet Public Library: Online Texts
• The Online Books Page
• Project Gutenberg
• UVA Digital Collections

General

• A Celebration of Women Writers is a collection of texts by and information about women writers.
• EServer.org at Iowa State University is a good starting place for most humanities-related topics, with information in a variety of categories, including cultural theory, drama, feminism, poetry, race, etc. 
• The Internet Public Library: Literary Criticism contains over 1,000 critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by literary period.
• Literary Resources on the Net provides links to a large number of web sites.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online  A Web companion to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which includes annotated texts from the Middle Ages, the Sixteenth Century, the Early Seventeenth Century, the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, the Romantic Period, and the Victorian Age, with over 1000 illustrations, over 300 Explorations to stimulate critical thinking and generate paper topics, cross-references to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and Seamus Heaney's introduction to his new verse translation of Beowulf.
• Reading Women Writers and African Literatures "This site proposes an overview of African women writers writing in French, South of the Sahara. It provides an opportunity to find out more about the authors' life and interests and to get acquainted with their novels, short stories, plays and poetry."
• Representative Poetry Online "Created and maintained at the University of Toronto, this site surveys 1,400 years of poetry in English..." (from a review in Choice by M.P. Shapiro)
• Voice of the Shuttle is a huge collection of humanities resources online, including materials on creative writing, drama, fiction, literature, poetry, etc.

Classical and Medieval

• Internet Medieval Sourcebook contains links to thousands of medieval sources, arranged by time period and topic.  A site with a wealth of primary material which is very easy to navigate.
• The Labyrinth is devoted to Medieval Studies and includes the full-text of Classical and Medieval texts, connections to Medieval Studies databases, and much more.
• Luminarium: Medieval Period Resources for the study of Middle English Literature.
• Middle English Compendium 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 Chaucer Society Resources for the study and teaching of Chaucer, includes a link to the Chaucer Bibliography Online and The World of Chaucer medieval books and manuscripts exhibition. You do not need to join the society in order to use the site.
• ORB: The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies  Includes The ORB Encyclopedia, a chronological and geographical index of essays, bibliographies, images, documents, links, and other resources; The ORB Reference Shelf, with links to excerpts and full texts from primary and secondary sources; and other resources.
• Perseus Digital Library  Primary and secondary sources for the study of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as selected later periods.
• Teams Middle English Texts "The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.

Renaissance, 16th and 17th Centuries

• The Edward Spenser Home page seeks to collect all Internet materials pertaining to Spenser.
• Google Books: Shakespeare  Searchable full text and links to Google Scholar, Video, and Images.
• Luminarium: the Renaissance  Resources for the study of sixteenth century Renaissance English literature.
• The Milton-L Homepage is a discussion list for those interested in the life, literature, and times of John Milton. Includes links to electronic versions of texts, scholarly articles, and book reviews.
• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet is an annotated guide to the scholarly Shakespeare resources available on Internet and presents new Shakespeare material unavailable elsewhere on the Internet, such as a timeline and genealogy. Includes links to full-text sites as well as criticism about Shakespeare.
• Renaissance Electronic Texts  A series of old-spelling editions of Renaissance books and manuscripts
• Voltaire: The Philosophical Dictionary  An online version of selections from Voltaire's Dictionary

18th to 20th Centuries

• African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century provides the full-text (and is keyword searchable) to 52 published works from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.
• Internet Poetry Archive contains the text to selected poems by contemporary poets, plus audio clips of the poets reading several poems and a short critical biography about the poet.
• Library of Southern Literature includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924.
• Modern American Poetry is a multimedia companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000). This site provides historical background and analyses of specific poems. The analyses and background information are excerpted from published works.
• Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets supports American poets at all stages of their careers.  This site is searchable and provides RealAudio readings of poems by their authors.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture "A multimedia archive." In addition to information about the book itself (reviews, articles, illustrations, and more), this site provides resources on access to slave narratives, and many other primary sources of the era.
• The Victorian Women Writers Project is an electronic collection of texts by British women writers of the late Victorian period.
• Women's Resource Project - Literature has links to information about, and works by, women authors.

21st Century

• University of Chicago Selected Fiction Web Sites
• Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color

Other Subject Guides
from Columbia University Libraries

• Guides to the Butler Reference Collection and Selected Resources on the Internet
    Includes Literature Resources
• Electronic Text Resources

 

Return to Subject Guides list