English Literature Classes - Waterbury
Getting Started
Refer to the Library's catalog and databases to find scholarly articles, books, and book chapters about literary works. Key databases for English classes are noted below. When beginning research, try various keyword searches such as:
- T.S. Eliot and interpretation
- Prufrock and criticism
- isolation and t.s. eliot
-
Academic Search Premier Includes articles from scholarly journals and popular magazines covering a wide variety of disciplines.
-
MLA International Bibliography Scholarly articles in literature and linguistics. Indexes over 6,000 national and international journals, as well as books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. From the Modern Language Association. 1926-current; selective coverage 1886-.
-
Gale Literary Sources Full-text poems, stories, novels, and more. Biographies of authors, literary criticism, literary movements, and genres. Cross-searches Gale Virtual Reference Library, Literature Criticism Online, and Literature Resource Center.
-
JSTOR Essential scholarly journals in many academic fields, especially arts, literature, humanities, and biology. Some back to early 1900s; most recent 2-5 years not available.
-
Project MUSE Full-text of over 200 journals in classics, education, history, literature, math, philosophy, politics, religion, and visual and performing arts as well as ebooks in areas of the social sciences and humanities.
Terms to Know
SEMINAL WORKS
Seminal works, also known as pivotal or landmark studies, will refer to ...
- writing that stimulates the work of other scholars in the field
- citations that appear repeatedly in the writing of others
- works that typically go back at least a decade
- works that are referred to as "influential" or "groundbreaking" in scholarly, peer-reviewed sources
Note how many times the seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar is noted to be cited on Google Scholar: 
SCHOLARLY/PEER REVIEWED
- Peer reviewed material appear in academic journals are evaluated by scholars in the field.
- The focus of such articles is relevance to the field. You'll find options to filter/refine database results to only display peer reviewed /scholarly articles.
- It's also important to determine what type of scholarly journal it iis. If you are writing an English paper, you may want to avoid other disciplines. Note "publication details" to learn about the journal title.
