New this term, the Library has a subscription to the Contemporary Literary Criticism Online collection.  This resource brings a vast number of critical essays on contemporary literature and makes them available in fulltext, right on your computer.

Sure we’ve had around 150 print volumes of the CLC in print on our Reference shelves for a while but it was cumbersome to use.  First you had to look through the title index looking for the literary work, then grab the print volumes from the shelf and find the essays individually.

Now, with the CLC Online, you can search for essays by Keyword, Named Author, Named Work, Critic Name, and Source Publication Title giving you far more flexiblity.

This is an excellent resource for criticism on the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and short story writers alive now or who died after December 31, 1959.   But what about works by authors who lived and died before 1960? For the earlier part of the 20th century we have a hundred volumes of the Twentieth-Century Literature Criticism available in Reference. And the online resource Literature Resource Center includes biographical and critical essays for works back to the classical period.

Good tools to remember when it’s time to take ENGL103.