LibGuides: English Composition & Literature: Literary Criticism

Finding Literary Criticism on the Web

INTERNET RESOURCES:

Google the title of a literary work or the name of an author. There are zillions of "lit crit" websites, so evaluate your results carefully. For information on evaluating sites, check out our Finding Reliable Sources libguide. Who created the site - are they an English professor or an unidentified ardent fan of the author? Who is allowed to post content? Do they have some kind of quality control?

Another Google trick: while not foolproof, good lit crit websites are likely to emanate from educational institutions and organizations. Try a Google search like the following (quotation marks included) to unearth sites with .edu or .org domain names:

".edu websites on William Faulkner"

.org websites on Edgar Allan Poe"

Bloom's Literary Reference Online
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Blooms Literature offers a comprehensive resource for the study of literature. Edited and curated by Yale University professor Harold Bloom, one of the worlds leading literary scholars, this database includes thousands of critical essays; author biographies, interviews, and profiles; character analyses; the full content of hundreds of books from our extensive reference collection and more than 1,000 classic works of literature; thousands of questions for discussion and writing; thousands of full-length poems; essays providing guidance on writing papers; full-length videos of classic stage performances and film adaptations of literary works; and a Shakespeare Center housing in one convenient location the databases treasure trove of content on all things Shakespeare.
Literary Reference Source Plus
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Literary Reference Center includes thousands of plot summaries, synopses, and work overviews; articles of literary criticism; author biographies; full text of over 430 literary journals; book reviews; classic and contemporary poems and short stories; full text of over 7,000 classic novels; author interviews; and images of key literary figures.
Literature Online
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Literature Online is a full-text library of over 330,000 works of British and American poetry, drama and prose. In addition to literary texts, LION includes biographical sketches of major writers, selected author bibliographies, and critical and reference works.
Literature Resource Center (Gale)
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Literature Resource Center provides biographies on thousands of authors, as well as literary criticism, historical context, and social implications of literature.
Salem Literature
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Salem Literature is a robust online database providing access to the Critical Insights series. Critical Insights is a comprehensive series that distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world's most-studied literature. Each volume in the series focuses on an individual author's entire body of work or on a single work of literature.

eBook Central
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From a single interface, researchers can access over 810,000 ebooks and 1,350 imprints from more than 650 publishers.
eBooks on EBSCOhost
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Contains a selection of multidisciplinary eBook titles representing a broad range of academic subject matter.

What Is Literary Criticism?

Literary criticism (also called literary analysis) consists of books, articles, Internet sites, or other forms of content created by individuals who have studied and written about a literary author and/or his works.

Keep in mind that criticism has not been published on all literary works - It is easier to find criticism on famous authors than on more obscure writers. Individual short stories, poems, and recently published works can also be challenging, .

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