| |
The Literature Resource Center is an excellent place to begin researching particular authors or literary works. Its contents include biographical essays, literary criticism, book reviews, and plot overviews. This database can help you understand how an author's life has shaped his or her literary output, explore major themes in a novel, or analyze the symbolism and structure of a poem or short story.
There are several options for conducting searches in Literature Resource Center. The homepage enables you to search by Author name, which will retrieve the full range of available documents about a particular author. You can click on Title search to find articles and essays about specific literary works, such as novels, short stories, and poems. If you are less interested in specific authors or works than in themes or literary movements, use the Keyword search option to enter search terms reflecting your topic.
If your basic search yields too many search results to readily examine, consider utilizing the Advanced Search module (shown above) to narrow your focus. Advanced Search permits you to simultaneously search on an author, title, and/or one or more topical keywords, connected by default with the Boolean "AND" operator. Use the drop-down boxes to indicate the appropriate search field for each term (e.g., author or title). Select the "Fulltext" option in a drop-down box to locate any articles in which the corresponding search term appears. You can use the Boolean "AND" and "OR" operators within your Fulltext search line to search on multiple terms. The asterisk (*) is a wildcard that enables you to retrieve variant forms of a word; in the example above, articles containing the words "morality", "morals", and "moralistic" will be found. Use quotation marks around groups of words to search them as a phrase.
This database only provides a few options for limiting the results of your search. If you are strictly interested in biographical essays or literary criticism, select the appropriate option(s) in the Document Type limiter before pressing the Search button.
The results screen is organized by type of document. Click the Biographies tab to read lengthy biographical profiles of the author, including a list of writings, analysis of major themes, and discussion of the author's critical reception. Under the Literary Criticism tab, click on "Literary Criticism" for scholarly articles analyzing particular works, "Articles" for book reviews and survey articles, and "Work Overviews" for basic summaries of the plot, themes, and characters of a literary work. Some articles may only be available in excerpt form; to obtain the complete full text, try searching the article title in the MLA International Bibliography database. The Additional Resources tab offers websites and author interviews relevant to your search terms.
On the results screen, you can checkmark potentially interesting items and click Update Mark List, which will transfer them to a Marked List screen. When you have finished your searching, click View Marked List to read through all your marked items.
To view an article, click on its blue link. In the article screen, hit Control-F (or Find) to search for particular words of interest within the article's text. Use the Print icon to print a nicely-formatted version of the article, or use the E-mail icon to email yourself the full text. Be sure to extract the article's complete citation information so that you can cite it properly in your bibliography.
For assistance with other features in this database, such as the Authors by Type search and the Literary-Historical Timeline, consult the Literature Resource Center help page. If you have questions about how to construct your search, see the Search Tips page.
|
