LibGuides: Literary Criticism: Resources to Use

Authors

Charles Dickens

Mark Twain

Anais Nin

Flannery O'Connor

Richard Wright

Virginia Woolf

William Faulkner

Shirley Jackson

Louise Erdrich

W.E.B. DuBois

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

William Shakespeare

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Edward Said

James Baldwin

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Zora Neale Hurston

Gloria Anzaldúa

Susan Sontag

Joy Harjo

Maryse Condé

T.S. Eliot

William Wordsworth

Edgar Allan Poe

Jack London

Friedrich Nietzsche

Leo Tolstoy

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Rudolfo Anaya

Kurt Vonnegut

Sandra Cisneros

George Orwell

James Joyce

Jane Austen

Jack Kerouac

Maya Angelou

Agatha Christie

Rachel Carson

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sylvia Plath

Truman Capote

Vladimir Nabokov

Haruki Murakami

Salman Rushdie

Elaine Showalter

Simone de Beauvoir

Hélène Cixous

Toni Morrison

Find Articles

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Background Information / Reference Database

Literary Reference Source
Contains a collection of author biographies, plot summaries & work overviews, full-text essays, literary reference books & monographs, literary magazines & journals, poems from hundreds of sources, short stories, classic texts, author interviews, and much more.

Literary Criticism: Databases

Start with these databases to find literary criticism, authors' bios, lists of literary works, and plot summaries.

IPL - Literary Criticism
The IPL Literary Criticism Collection contains critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by nationality and literary period. The collection is not inclusive of all the work on the web, nor does it plan to be. The sites are selected with some thought to their overall usefulness.
Literature Criticism Online
Gale Literature brings together Gale's literary databases in a new digital environment. Contains bibliographies, primary sources, biographies, literature criticism, news & reviews of a piece of literature.
Literature (Gale)
Gale Literature is an online database that collects Gale's literary databases, supporting researchers at all levels to search across materials through a single interface.
Currently, users can search these collections with Gale Literature:
- Gale Literature Criticism
- Gale Literature Resource Center
- LitFinder
- Subcollections of eBook titles
- Dictionary of Literary Biography
- Something About the Author
- Contemporary Authors

General Databases Covering Literature

Use these databases to find more general information about literary works, book reviews, authors' bios and contextual information.

Essay and General Literature Index (H.W. Wilson)
Contains citations to essays and articles on the humanities and social sciences. These essays are found in collections of essays and miscellaneous works published in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.
Short Story Index (H.W. Wilson)
Detailed indexing of more than 117 000 stories from more than 4 200 collections and anthologies

Other Disciplines

Sometimes articles from scholarly journals in other disciplines can inform the critical writing you do on literary works. Below are links to some databases from other fields which may provide useful articles.

JSTOR
JSTOR offers journals, ebooks, and primary source collections, allowing researchers to retrieve high-resolution scanned images as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The resources archived in JSTOR span many disciplines.
Academic Search Complete
This database covers many subjects found at colleges and universities. Contains articles from thousands of journals, magazines, news sources, and videos from the Associated Press.