| |
Professor
Kristin O'Brien
Library Liaison
Jeff Waller
Contents
Introduction
Research Basics
Reference Sources for
Background Information
Find Books/Secondary Sources
Find Journal Articles
Selected Websites
How to Cite Your Sources
Subject Guide
English
|
|
This is a guide to selected sources of information related to the New England literary tradition in the Geisel Library. It is meant as a starting point for your research. For further research assistance, please stop by the Reference Desk in person or pose your question online at Ask a Librarian.
The reference librarians have created a group of webpages named Research Help, and a tutorial called Searchpath, designed to help teach you the basics of library research and to introduce you to Geisel Library. On the Research Help pages, you will find a guide on Research Basics that walks you through the seven steps of doing successful college-level research. Please take advantage of these resources.
Reference books are shelved by call number in the reference stacks near the reference desk. They may not be checked out, but photocopiers are available on the lower level of the Library. Online reference sources can be found in the library catalog or listed on the
E-Reference Resources page. Use reference resources to find background information on authors and literary works, as well as the social issues, historical periods, and themes being addressed in this course.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Find overviews on a wide variety of topics by searching this online encyclopedia. This is a good source for obtaining background info on authors and finding good keywords that represent your topic.
Oxford Reference Online
This database enables you to search within many of Oxford's highly-regarded reference works in the fields of literature and history, including the Oxford Companion to American Literature and Oxford Companion to United States History. These are good for basic background information on authors and historical events.
Literary Theory and Symbolism
These reference sources can help you understand the terminology you encounter in literary criticism, as well as interpret the meaning of symbols in literary works.
Dictionary of Literary Terms (Shaw)
Ref PN44.5 .S46
Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Cuddon)
Ref PN41 .C83
Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs (2 vols.)
Ref PN43 .D48
Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory
Ref PN44.5 .H37 1998
Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary
Ref CB475 .O38 1986
Literary Criticism and Author Biographies
Literature Resource Center
This database includes lengthy biographical profiles of authors, plot summaries, and literary criticism for over 90,000 novelists, poets, and other writers. This resource also provides the full text of articles from more than 100 literary journals. User Guide
American Renaissance in New England
Ref PS243 .A54
American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies (13 vols.)
Ref PS129 .A55
Critical Survey of Short Fiction (7 vols.)
Ref PN3373 .C7
Critical Survey of Long Fiction (8 vols.)
Ref PN3451 .C7
Critical Survey of Poetry (8 vols.)
Ref PR502 .C85
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Ref PS323.5 .E63
Encyclopedia of the Novel
Ref PN41 .E487, 2 volumes
Literary Criticism Series
Contemporary Literary Criticism (Ref PN94 .C65)
Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism (Ref PN761 .N56)
Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (Ref PN94 .T83)
To find out the volumes in which your author or literary work are covered, use the Gale Literary Index.
Modern American Women Writers
Ref PS151 .M54
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Ref PS21 .E537 (print version, 4 vols.)
Twentieth-Century American Literature (8 vols.)
Ref PS221.T843
Writers of the American Renaissance
Ref PS201 .W75
New England History and Culture
The Encyclopedia of New England
Ref F2 .E43
The Encyclopedia of New England: the Culture and History of an American Region
Ref F4 .E53
Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century (3 vols.)
Ref E169.1 .E626
Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (5 vols.)
Ref E740.7 .E53
New England in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography
Ref PS243 .S57
Return to top
Examples of subject headings to search in the Catalog:
Try searching some of these phrases as Subject Headings in the catalog. This method often finds a higher percentage of books that are directly relevant to a particular topic. If you are researching a particular author or work, try searching the author's name as a Subject to locate biographies and literary criticism.
- American literature – New England
- American literature – New England – History and criticism
- New England – Civilization
- New England – Economic conditions
- New England – Intellectual life
- New England – In literature
- New England – History
- New England – Women – History
- Transcendentalism (New England)
Examples of keyword searches to use in the Catalog:
To find books about more narrowly-focused topics, try searching Keywords that represent those topics. For example, you may wish to search the names of specific states, and add keywords representing concepts that you want to explore. Here are some examples:
- (Farm OR rural OR country) AND New England
- Puritan* AND New England
- New England AND (identity OR self)
- Maine AND (literature OR stories)
- (Emerson OR Thoreau) AND natur*
Use the * (asterisk) as a truncation symbol to retrieve variant forms of a word root; for example, natur* will catch books with the words "nature" or "natural" in the catalog record. Use the Boolean AND to combine together multiple concepts, and use the Boolean OR to expand your search with synonyms and related terms.
Samples of General Collection books found using Subject and Keyword searches:
Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity
F4 .C76
New England Town in Fact and Fiction
PS243 .W43
The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry
PS541.A67
Hawthorne And The Historical Romance Of New England
PS1888 .B4
Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist
PS3511 .R94 Z758
If you are unable to locate enough materials in the Geisel Library catalog, search the collections of libraries worldwide using WorldCat. This enables you to identify relevant books owned by other colleges and have them delivered to Geisel Library for your use, via our Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service. Try searching on the same keywords and subject headings that you used in the library catalog. If you find a relevant book, click on the title and look for the Request ILL link. Once you submit the request, the book is typically delivered to Geisel Library within 7–8 days.
Return to top
Below are several databases that may yield useful journal articles for your research. Some focus on literary criticism while others will provide historical and socio-cultural context for the literature. Try searching on the same keywords that you used in the book catalog. Remember to use Boolean operators and wildcards (the asterisk symbol) to improve your search.
In the results screen, if there is no full-text link readily available, click on the  icon to determine whether the journal is available in the Geisel Library or in full-text via another electronic database. If the article isn't available, consider clicking on the Interlibrary Loan link to request a PDF copy of the article from another library. Articles requested via ILL will be delivered to your email inbox within about a week. To learn how to use WebBridge, please watch our video tutorial (3.5 mins; includes audio).
Literature Resource Center
Find biographical information on authors, as well as bibliographies, plot summaries, and literary criticism of their works. This resource also provides the full text of articles from more than 100 literary journals. User Guide
MLA International Bibliography
Produced by the Modern Language Association of America, this electronic index consists of bibliographic records pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. User Guide
Academic Search Premier
A broad index providing abstracts and some full-text for a range of academic areas, including literature, politics, and sociology.
America: History and Life
Provides abstracts to journal articles, book/media reviews, and dissertations with a focus on United States and Canadian history and culture from prehistoric times to the present.
Early American Newspapers, 1690–1876
This text-searchable database has cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic American newspapers, including 37 from New Hampshire.
JSTOR
Search here for full-text articles from major journals in the humanities and social sciences. Coverage is generally from the beginning of publication to within 5 years of the current issue. User Guide
Project MUSE
This database offers all full-text articles from over 300 peer-reviewed journals; subjects include humanities, arts, medicine, mathematics, social sciences, and more.
SocINDEX
This sociology database provides full-text articles from journals, books, monographs, and conference papers. Coverage is of all subdisciplines of sociology, including criminal justice, ethnic and racial studies, gender studies, social psychology, urban studies, and more.
Return to top
These websites were handpicked for their relevance to your course topic. You may also want to conduct keyword searching on your topics in a search engine such as Google, but be sure to look for indications that the site's information is authoritative, objective and reliable.
American Transcendentalism Web (Virginia Commonwealth)
This site provides an excellent overview of transcendentalism and literature, including the writers who worked within this movement, the themes and ideas they explored, and literary criticism of their works.
Modern American Poetry (Univ. of Illinois)
This academic, collaboratively-developed website provides analysis and commentary on over 150 poets and their works, including Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Elizabeth Bishop. Some of the analyses are unique to the website, but most were originally published in scholarly journals or books.
Voice of the Shuttle: American Literature Resources
This website has a long history as an electronic gateway for humanities researchers, including an enormous listing of online resources related to American literature. The page is organized roughly by time period and author.
Return to top
See the library's How To Cite Your Sources guide for resources on how to properly cite research materials. Always confirm the style required by your instructor.
Return to top
|
|
