This guide is designed to help students and faculty find research materials having to do with English-language literature. This page provides resources to help you develop a research topic and keywords, and provides some information on starting your research. Use the tabs at the top of the page to access more detailed information on finding and citing sources, as well as a summary of some of the services offered by the library.
Start here! These databases can help you get started on your research. Visit the tab on "Finding Sources" for more subject specific research resources.
Full text of more than 500,000 works of poetry, prose and drama from the 8th century to the present day. Includes more than thirty individual literature collections comprised of canonical texts, non-English language literature, and diverse underrepresented authors and their works. Supported with full text journals, criticism and reference resources extending to all aspects of literary studies, featuring coverage by the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL). **Note: Database contains all content formerly in Literature Online (LION). Click more... to view a list of modules.
ProQuest One Literature searches these literature collections. Use the Literature collection filter within the ProQuest interface to select individual modules to include in your search.
•African American Poetry: The early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American to the major poets of the nineteenth century.
•African Writers Series: Key texts of modern African literature published in the Heinemann's African Writers Series since 1962.
•American Drama (1714-1915): Over 1,500 American dramatic works.
•American Poetry: Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.
•Bertolt Brechts Werke: The dramatic, poetical and theoretical texts of Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956).
•Black Short Fiction and Folklore: 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present.
•Black Women Writers: 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora.
•Canadian Poetry: 19,000 poems by 177 poets from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth.
•Caribbean Literature: Literature produced by descendants of the African, Indian, and South Asian populations brought to the Caribbean between the 15th and 19th centuries.
•Die Deutsche Lyrik in Reclams Universal-Bibliothek: Almost 500 years of German lyric poetry and includes the work of over 500 authors from the 15th to the 20th century.
•Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker: Series published since 1981, covers the works of more than thirty German authors spanning eleven centuries.
•Early American Fiction (1789-1875): Full text of 875 first editions of American novels and short stories.
•Early English Prose Fiction (1500-1700): More than 200 works from the period 1500–1700, exploring English prose fiction in the period preceding the emergence of the realist novel as its dominant form.
•Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780): 96 complete works of English prose from the period 1700–1780, by writers from the British Isles.
•English Drama: More than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English.
•English Poetry (1700-1780): Essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th.
•English Poetry, Second Edition: Comprehensive canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th, and representing more than 2,700 poets.
•The Faber Poetry Library (1925-1999): Collection of fifty of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, includes the poetry of Thom Gunn, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney.
•Goethes Werke: Complete text of the Weimar Edition of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
•Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period: More than 80 volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842.
•Kafkas Werke: A critical edition of the complete works of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Franz Kafka, Kritische Ausgabe, Schriften und Tagebücher.
•Latin American Women Writers: 100,000 pages of literary works, along with memoirs and essays, in their original language, by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century to the present.
•Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction: 100,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, novels, and more than 450 plays.
•Literary Theory: Works that have had a significant bearing on English and American traditions of theory and criticism, or which have influenced contemporary theoretical debate in the English-speaking world.
•Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1782-1903): 250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, stretching from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s.
•Schillers Werke: Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, presents the works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), German playwright, poet, and philosopher.
•Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period: 60 volumes of Romantic poetry composed by Scottish women, includes contemporary criticism and essays.
•South and Southeast Asian Literature in English: Thousands of pages of English-language fiction, short fiction, and poems written from the end of the colonial era to the present.
•Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro: Full text of the most important dramatic works of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain - more than 800 plays written by 16 dramatists.
•Twentieth-Century African American Poetry (1901-1999): Modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century.
•Twentieth-Century American Poetry (1901-2000): 50,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets.
•Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Second Edition: Over 100,000 poems representing the full range of American poetry of the last century.
•Twentieth-Century Drama: Essential collection of published plays from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day.
•Twentieth-Century English Poetry: A collection of 598 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to 2000.
1. Select a topic that interests you and do some pre-research. Look at course readings and class notes. Find information using Google, Wikipedia, CQ Researcher, or Credo Reference if you need ideas.
2. Consider the scope of your topic. If it is too narrow, you might have trouble finding enough information. If it is too broad, you can be overwhelmed with information.
Think about your assignment prompt while determining the scope of your topic. It is important to consider the size of the assignment and the length of time you have to complete it in thinking about scope.
3. Turn your focused topic into a research question. Know that your research question may change slightly depending on what sorts of resources you find. While you should have a topic or question in mind, allow the sources you find, along with your interests, to help shape and refine your topic further.
Questions to guide the development of your research question:
Is it focused enough to be covered in my paper or project?
Is there enough literature available on this topic?
What is the question that my research is answering?
Am I genuinely interested in this topic?
Is my topic going to be new and interesting to my audience?
How do you determine if a resource has quality, useful information?
Brainstorming keywords for your topic will help you refine your topic, find the most information about your topic and save you time by helping you search databases in a more efficient and systematic way.
(Why? Different authors will refer to the same concept in different ways. Having a comprehensive list of keywords to search will help you find more information about your topic!)
1. Pick out the main ideas in your research question. For example, the main ideas in this research question are in bold: “What does Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre reveal about colonialist thought in 1800s England?”
2. Take each of your main ideas and brainstorm as many synonyms, related words, acronyms, initialisms and spelling variants as you can. For example:
3. Do this for each of your main ideas. Searching all the variants you can come up with will give you a broader selection of relevant information. Consider making a chart to keep track of which combinations of keywords you have searched for.
4. Know that there is no such thing as a perfect search. Searching is a process, so having a list of potential keywords will help you begin your research. You’ll find that different combinations of keywords will bring up different results in different databases. You can still learn something from every search you perform, so know that this list of keywords can continue to grow throughout your research process.
You can also use what you learn from searching to redefine your research topic or question.
5. Several other specific search techniques can help you use your brainstormed keywords. Take a look at:
Another search strategy is to use subject terms or phrases. Subject terms are standardized word(s) that describe the main idea of an article or other source. In many databases, but not all, you can use subject terms or phrases to capture the different ways authors refer to the same concept. For example, in the database Academic Search Complete, you will find the following subject terms representing “colonialism”:
You can identify subject terms by looking at a source citation or abstract in a database, or under the Details tab in OneSearch. Subject terms vary by database, they are not always intuitive, and it is common to use both keywords and subject terms in constructing a search.
Like searching with keywords, it is a good idea to keep track of which combinations of subject terms you have searched.
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