Library Research Guides: WRIT 120: Critical Interpretation: Home

Welcome

This guide provides some useful starting places for your research. I'm happy to meet with you to help with any part of the research process, from finding and evaluating sources to understanding how to cite them. You can email me (kstorz@wellesley.edu), make an appointment on my calendar (bit.ly/storzappt), or contact me via chat (under my profile on this page) — whatever works for you! If I'm not currently on chat, you can also use the main library chat to reach a librarian.

Karen Storz, Research & Instruction Librarian

Image: Winslow Homer. The New Novel. 1877. ArtSTOR.

SuperSearch

Key Databases for Literary Criticism & Biographical Sources

Databases can contain a combination of full-text (ready to read online) and citation information that can lead you to articles, book chapters, or books. It's always a good idea to search in more than one database. Even if there is considerable overlap in content, the different search capabilities and features of each database can help you find different sources.

Literature Online (LION)
Literary criticism from over 400 journals, along with thousands of literary texts from 1600 to the present. Focused on literature in English.
MLA International Bibliography
The most comprehensive database for finding scholarly articles, books, and book chapters on literature and related fields. International in scope, it covers the latest scholarship back to the 1880s. Use the "Find it! @Wellesley" link to get the full text. If we don't have it, you can request it through Interlibrary Loan. See MLA Search Tips on this guide.
Literature Resource Center
Biographies, bibliographies and full-text critical analysis of authors from all genres and eras, including the contents of Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism.
JSTOR
Collection of key scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences & natural sciences, starting from the first issue but typically not the most recent 3-5 years.
Project MUSE
Academic journals in the humanities and social sciences.

MLA Search Tips

To find critical sources on a particular author in the MLA International Bibliography, choose SA Primary Subject Author from the search box menu.

Add other terms to narrow your focus.

Look at the Subjects that come up under the citations. They can provide you with additional ideas for search terms.

For more tips on database searching, see the Search Tips page of this guide.

General Search Tips

Use synonyms and truncation to find the different ways your topic might be expressed—computers are very literal
Combine multiple concepts using AND / OR for best results
Use quotation marks to search words as a phrase

Sample topic: Cultural identity in the poetry of Li-Young Lee

(identity OR self) [synonyms]

AND (cultur* OR ethnic* OR immigra* OR "Asian American") [truncation & phrase searching]

AND Li-Young Lee

AND poetry

Find Books on Your Topic

After you do your search, change Entire Collection to Online/electronic to see only materials available online. Or search the entire collection, and if you find a relevant title in print only, try searching for it in the National Emergency Library.

Internet Archive Books

If you find a book through SuperSearch that is only available in print, see if you can find it in the Internet Archive. You can borrow digitized copies of books for up to 14 days with a free account. Access is limited to one user at a time per book, so be sure to return the book as soon as you're done to make it available for others. Change "Metadata" to "Text Contents" to search for keywords in the full content of all of the Internet Archive's digitized books.