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.

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry

Looking for a poem but aren’t sure where it was published?  No problem.  The Library now has a subscription to the World of Poetry, an amazing poetry resource that can help you find that poem.

In fact, the Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry contains the full-text of more than 250,000 poems and has citations to more than 450,000 poems published in books, anthologies, and periodicals.

But that’s not all!  It also provides the complete body of work for major poets such as Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Marvell, Poe, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and others.  It also includes searchable versions of many poetry reference books, and history and criticism from selected periodicals.

The advanced search features make this a very powerful resource for literary research.  The detailed subject index helps to identify poems for comparison, a frequent assignment.  The World of Poetry also gives you the ability to search for poems by words from the first or last line of a poem, an important feature which will help in tracking down familiar poems even if the poet and title are unknown.

Now that poem will be a lot easier to find.