WR 301 Critical Writing in English - Lincoln: Home

This guide provides resources and tools to support your work on your annotated bibliography assignment; your text, context and interpretation assignment; and also your encounter assignment. 

The tabs in this guide can help address particular aspects of your assignments.

• Encyclopedia & Reference Works: Resources that give overviews and context for your topic; they can address theory, genre, author biography, terminology, historical periods, etc.  These are good sources for preliminary reading on your literary work, your author, a theory, a historical period, a literary genre, or other topic for the Paper #1 or Paper #2 assignments.
• Criticism: books, essays, databases: Find secondary sources in books; use critical compilations to gain an understanding of the critical work that has been done on an author, work, or period. 
• Finding Journal Articles:  Resources and instructions on how to find academic articles which would be the secondary sources you include in your assignments.
• Biographical sources: Resources and databases to locate biographical information on authors. This kind of information could be part of your preliminary reading for defining your topic.
• Using the Library & LIbrary Web Site:  Learn how to use the Library, including searching the catalog, finding books on the shelf or ordering books via Summit.
• MLA Bibliography: The MLA International Bibliography is the most important database for literary and language study. Using it you can identify secondary sources (journal articles, essay, books, or book chapters) that you can use in your assignments.
• Citing Sources: Online and print resources on citing books and articles. Includes links to online citation generators, style guides and citation management software.

These resources are among the very best for literary study.  The MLA International Bibliography appears first on the list as this database is major resource for doing research in literature of all languages. You will also find it useful for linguisics and folklore.

• MLA International Bibliography Citations to journal articles, dissertations, and books in literature, language, linguistics, and folklore from 1963 to the present. Documentation from MLA on searching the bibliography, how the fields are defined. etc. See the page in this guide that demonstrates strategies for searching it. 
• Literature Online - LION Features a collection of over 260,000 works of American, English, and Modern poetry, drama, and prose with complementary reference and secondary resources. Includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), containing more than 880,000 records, covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards.
• Literature Resource Center
  Provides information on literary figures from all time periods writing in such genres as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, journalism, and more.

 Online Full-text Journals:  

• JSTOR
  Contains historical backfiles of full text articles from major research journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Excellent resource to discover how a work was received and reviewed after publication, or how an author was perceived during their lifetime. JSTOR's coverage of a journal goes back to the earliest issues of a journal and comes forward to within three-five years of the present.
• ProjectMuse
  Full text articles and ebooks from scholarly presses.

Review journals

• Literature Compass
  Literature Compass is an online-only journal publishing peer-reviewed survey articles of the most important research and current thinking from across the entire discipline.
• Review of English Studies Review articles, notes, articles and summaries of periodical literature covering the contents of selected major literary journals.
• SEL (Studies in English Literature)
  Reviews historical and critical literary studies in the post-medieval to pre-1900 periods