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.
Reflections on Heliotropia and the Future of E-journal Publishing in the Humanities
The future of scholarly communications is a hotly debated and very important topic. The Drexel University Libraries even host a fantastic annual symposium on the issue. But much of the discussion focuses on what is happening in STM (Science, Technology, and Medicine) fields. So, how are scholars in the Humanities thinking about how scholarly communication is changing?
Michael Papio, a Boccacio scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Heliotropia, has written a great article drawing on his experience co-founding an open access Boccacio Studies e-journal to examine the challenges ( and possibilities) of e-publishing in the Humanities.
The article itself was published in an Open Access journal. Well worth a look.
M. Papio, Reflections on Heliotropia and the Future of E-journal Publishing in the Humanities, Storicamente, 4 (2008), http://www.storicamente.org/02_tecnostoria/filologia_digitale/papio.html
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
Do those names sound familiar? Have you seen them mentioned in a journal article or heard them mentioned in a class? Want to know about their contribution to literary theory? Are you a student in History, Anthropology, Philosophy, or Political Science and are hearing about critical theory for the first time? If so, or if you have other questions about literary theory, then this is the resource for you.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism includes more than 240 entries written by 275 experts that help explain the ideas of the major theories and theorists. It also includes entries on historical developments in criticism and the many influential schools and movements. This is an important tool for anyone getting started with critical theory. This title is updated annually.
Geoffry Chaucer Hath a Blog
Ok, so this isn’t really a research tool, or any other kind of tool for that matter, but is very funny. Funny in an English major kind of way. And how often do you get to practice your Middle English?
Of course this website is not just fun and games. Links to real life Chaucer, Middle English, and medieval literature web resources are provided as well.
