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Literature - English Language

Reference

Dictionaries, Directories, Handbooks, Encyclopedias, etc. - Reference works are useful when you need to obtain quick facts, define the terms and scope of your search, or get a broad overview of a topic. Best Bets! are marked with aBest Bet!.
Products available to registered McMaster Students/Staff/Faculty Only are marked with a McMaster Use Only.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online McMaster Use Only 

Historical dictionary of the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of earliest records down to the present day with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. Use the OED search box on the right to look up a word right from this page! (Note: only works on campus.)

Oxford Reference Online McMaster Use Only 
Multi-part database of the online versions of seminal Oxford University Press texts. Each topical division contains the searchable version of the latest edition of published dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (online) McMaster Use Only
Searchable version of the Concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms provides access to over 1,000 literary terms and a pronunciation guide for over 200 troublesome phrases and terms.

Johns' Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
The Guide consists of 226 alphabetically arranged entries on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods." Each entry includes numerous cross-references, hyperlinks to related entries, and citations for further reading.

Literature Resource Center McMaster Use Only
Gale's Literature Resource Center provides critical analyses, biographies, and bibliographies for authors from every age and literary discipline. The database covers more than 130,000 novelists, essayist, poets, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors.  Content is pulled from several well-known print reference series including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Contermporary Authors.

 

 

 

 

 

Primary Texts

Primary texts may be the literary works themselves (manuscripts, novels, poems, short stories, diaries, etc.) or first-hand accounts of an event or a person's life or work. These include letters, autobiographies, posters, diaries, archival materials, and photographs. Best Bets! are marked with aBest Bet!.
Products available to registered McMaster Students/Staff/Faculty Only are marked with a McMaster Use Only.

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
Collection of online documents related to English literature, American literature, and Western philosophy. Allows the user to search for literature and documents by keywords, authors, titles, or file names. Offers access to downloadable philosophy, English, and American literature texts.

Canadian poetry archive : Archives de poésie canadienne McMaster Use Only
The National Library of Canada presents the Canadian Poetry Archive, a database of selected poems by English and French language Canadian Poets. The archive also includes biographies and access to additional information.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) McMaster Use Only
EEBO contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.

Early English Prose Fiction McMaster Use Only
Over 200 complete works in fictional prose from the period 1500-1700.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook - Full Text Sources
Full texts of medieval sources arranged according to type.

Literature Online McMaster Use Only
A fully searchable library of more than 260,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key secondary sources. Includes English poetry from 600 to the present, American and African-American poetry from 1603 to the present, The Faber Poetry Library, English fiction from the sixteenth century, and English drama from 1280 to 1915, including Shakespeare.

Renaissance Electronic Texts McMaster Use Only
A series of old-spelling editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works.

Short Story Index McMaster Use Only
Indexes more than 84,000 short stories—plus the full text of more than 1,600 short stories.

University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Collections
An on-line archive of thousands of SGML-encoded electronic texts (some of which are publicly available) with a library-based Center housing hardware and software suitable for creation and analysis of text.

Women Writers Project McMaster Use Only
The Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) brings texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and makes them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.

Books

Use McMaster's Library Catalogue to find books on your topic. Click the Help link for searching tips & strategies.

If you're looking for books BY someone:

  • type in the author's name in the search box and hit "GO"
  • one of the options under "Refine your search" is "Author" -- if we have books in our collection by this author, you should see his/her name listed here.
  • click the author's name (e.g. "Atwood, Margaret Eleanor") for a complete list of all the titles in the catalogue BY that author.
  • e.g. if you're looking for books by Margaret Atwood, type "margaret atwood" in the search box (no quotes required) and hit "GO". On the results screen, select "Atwood, Margaret Eleanor" from the "Author" limit on the left-hand side of the screen. This will give you a complete list of all the titles in the catalogue BY Atwood.

If you're looking for books ABOUT someone:

  • type in the person's name in the search box and hit "GO"
  • one of the options under "Refine your search" is "Subject" -- if we have books in our collection about this this person, you should see his/her name listed here.
  • click the author's name (e.g. "Atwood, Margaret Eleanor") for a complete list of all the titles in the catalogue ABOUT that author.
  • e.g. if you're looking for about by Margaret Atwood, type "margaret atwood" in the search box (no quotes required) and hit "GO". On the results screen, select "Atwood, Margaret Eleanor" from the "Subject" limit on the left-hand side of the screen. This will give you a complete list of all the titles in the catalogue ABOUT Atwood.
 

 

Articles/Databases

Use article databases to find out which journals, magazines, and newspapers have published articles on your topic. Most useful when recent information is required, or when the topic is too specific to be covered in a book. Best Bets! are marked with aBest Bet!.
Products available to registered McMaster Students/Staff/Faculty Only are marked with a McMaster Use Only.

MLA International Bibliography 
The premiere database for topics in Language & Literature, the MLA Bibliography is published by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) and includes citations covering literature, language, film, linguistics and folklore.

Humanities Abstracts

Broad coverage of all humanities disciplines including scholarly articles, book reviews, reviews of motion pictures, plays, and radio and television programs. Areas of coverage: archaeology, classical studies, art, performing arts, philosophy, history, music, linguistics, literature, and religion, with 36,000+ new records added annually.
 

British Humanities Index (BHI)

Indexes and abstracts articles from over 320 internationally respected humanities journals and weekly magazines published in the UK and other English speaking countries. Major areas of coverage include: architecture, archaeology, art, antiques, cinema, current affairs, education, economics, environment, foreign affairs, gender studies, history, language, law, linguistics, literature, music, painting, philosophy, poetry, political science, religion and theatre.
 

CPI.Q. Canadian Periodicals Index

Indexes articles from Canadian journals and magazines. Coverage 1980 to present. Useful for finding articles on minor Canadian authors.

 

Literature Resource Center McMaster Use Only

Gale's Literature Resource Center provides critical analyses, biographies, and bibliographies for authors from every age and literary discipline. The database covers more than 130,000 novelists, essayist, poets, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors.  Content is pulled from several well-known print reference series including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Contermporary Authors.

Arts & Humanities Citation Index

A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. Subjects covered include archaeology, art, architecture, asian studies, classics, dance, folklore, history, language, linguistics, literary reviews, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, radio, television, & film, religion and theatre.

Websites

The Internet is home to useful web sites on many subjects. Unlike the resources on other tabs, the following resources are selected from the free web. Remember to critically evaluate web resources, since web site content is usually unmonitored and unregulated.

Voice of the Shuttle
 An excellent annotated guide to literature resources on the web.

The Internet Public Library - Literary Criticism resources
A collection of critical and biographical web sites about authors and their works.

Literature Resources on the Net
Maintained by Jack Lynch (Rutgers), this set of pages is a collection of links to sites on the Internet dealing especially with English and American literature.