ENG 300 Literary Form and Analysis - Hines: Articles & book chapters

Literary criticism

An important aspect of literary research is to explore the scholarship that has been done on your topic. You may think of it as a conversation that you are about to join. This "scholarly communication" takes the form of journal articles, books and book chapters with extended participation through citations and bibliographies.

Book chapters

PSU Library Catalog
Searches the holdings of both PSU and Summit Libraries. Here you'll find books, journals, DVDs, maps, government documents, etc.
Find books on Toni Morrison's Beloved in PSU Library and Summit libraries
Find books of criticism on Toni Morrison in PSU Library and Summit libraries

MLA International Bibliography
Indexes citations for world literature, literary criticism, linguistics, and folklore. Provides citations to international journals and series as well as books, book chapters, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Covers from 1963 to the present.

MLA Bibliography

The MLA International Bibliography gets its own box on this page as it is the major resource for doing research in the literatures of all languages. You will also find it useful for linguisics and folklore.

MLA International Bibliography
Provides citations to journal articles, dissertations, and books about world literature, literary criticism, language, linguistics, and folklore from 1963 to the present.

You can focus MLA searches by using the Primary Subject Work or Primary Subject Author fields.

A "normal" MLA search for criticism of the novel Beloved (note the large number of resulting citations).

Use the 'Select a Field' option to narrow the focus of your result set.

There are many fields in the MLA records, you will need to scroll down to choose Primary Subject Work or Primary Subject Author.

Notice how much smaller the set of records is:

Focusing MLA searches further

You can add a keyword in another search box to narrow your results. In this case you would retrieve only those records about Beloved where the word 'ghost' also occurs in the article title, subject headings, etc.

You can also use two other search techniques:

truncation - use a symbol (the asterisk *) that tells the search engine to find that word root and any ending. In this example the search engine will retrieve haunt, haunts, haunted, haunting.

OR - you can use a synonym for your concept and the search engine will retrieve records with either term.

MLA Bibliography and Databases

This series of short videos covers how to search for articles and essays using the MLA database. These videos walk you through searching and then using the navigation tools to link to the full text content in PSU Library's holdings of books and journals.

Search for an Article Using Google Scholar

Use Google Scholar from the PSU Library, and enter the title of the article. If the Library has the article, there will be a link to the right, Find it @ PSU.

Find it @ PSU leads to the full text article in the PSU Library catalog.

If it is not available full text through Google Scholar, PSU Library could still hold the article in print. Search for the journal to see the Library's holdings. If the library does not hold the journal at all, request it from Interlibrary Loan & Article Delivery.