• Finding Books
• Reference Resources
• Articles
• Web Resources
• Research Tips

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Finding Books

Using Catalogs: Use the WSU online catalog to find location and availability of books and other media in Stewart Library. Most of the books on twentieth century English and Anglo-Irish literature are located on the middle level of the library in the General Collection under the call numbers PS and PR.

Use World Cat to find books in other libraries.  Stewart Library Interlibrary Loan to get books and articles we don't own.

 

Electronic Books: 

• WSU has a subscription to about 3,000 titles available at Netlibrary.  Netlibrary also includes many titles in the public domain.  You may also use the WSU online catalog to find these books.

 

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Reference Resources

Reference resources include encyclopedias, dictionaries and other materials you use to "refer" to. Use these resources for background information on a topic. For home or off campus access please use your WSU Login.

ONLINE REFERENCE RESOURCES

• Literature Resource Center -Includes Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography and other materials) -  Literature Resource Center provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of over 90,000 authors from every age and literary discipline. Search by Author Name, Title, Genre, Literary Movement or Literary Themes. A great place to start any literature research project or paper.
• The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English - Searchable within the Oxford Reference Online
• Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature - The Encyclopedia provides comprehensive coverage of literature including the entire history of literature in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland in the major literary languages (Anglo-Saxon, English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Latin). It includes substantial accounts of individual authors and detailed histories of particularly significant themes, movements, genres, and institutions.
• The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature - Searchable within the Oxford Reference Online
• The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature - Searchable within the Oxford Reference Online
• Oxford English Dictionary 
• xreferplus - Literature over a dozen reference books covering literature.

 PRINT REFERENCE RESOURCES

• Contemporary Literary Criticism - Stewart Library, Middle level, REF PN813.C6
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature (edited by Margaret Drabble) - Stewart Library, Middle level, REF PR19.D73 1995
• Readers Guide to Literature in English - Stewart Library , Middle level, REF PR 85.R33 1996

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Finding Articles

ARTICLE DATABASES

To find articles on your topic you need to use article databases, also known as periodical indexes. Each database usually covers a group of subject related journals. Search by subject or keyword in these indexes. Most indexes are available from off campus. 

• MLA - Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography is usually the best index for researching literature and literary criticism topics. MLA provides article reference for articles in literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore back to 1963. Updated ten times per year. See the MLA Guide
  • Many of the article references in MLA are NOT full text
  • To get the full text of articles use the following steps:
    1. Check the journal name in our Ejournals to see if the article is available online in another database. If it is available then you are set.
    2. OR order the article from an other library through Interlibrary Loan using the Illiad System form
    • Articles ordered through Iterlibrary loan usually arive in a day or two and you get to keep the photocopy of the article.
• Academic Search Premier - Provides many full text articles in important journals & magazines in all fields. 
• Arts & Humanities Search - Citations from many of the world's leading arts and humanities journals. 1980 - present, updates weekly. 
• IIPA -- International Index to Performing Arts - Citations, abstracts and some full-text articles on all aspects of the performing arts including plays and playwrights.
• JSTOR -  A group of full-text journals in many subjects, including literature. Dates of coverage vary. 

BROWSING CURRENT PERIODICALS

Current magazines and journals can be browsed in the Current Periodicals Area, in the "P" section on the Middle level. Bound volumes of older issues are found upstairs in the periodicals stacks.

ELECTRONIC JOURNALS

Want to know what journals we have?  Check our Ejournals Database .

Titles we have access to include:

• The Journal of Modern Literature
• Modern Fiction Studies
• Modernism/Modernity
• Diacritics
• Post Modern Culture

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Web Resources

Here are some WWW sites to get you started. Most of these will take you to other links, so explore!

 

• The English Server - The English Server at Iowa State University is a cooperative which has been publishing humanities texts online since 1990. Today it offers over eighteen thousand works, covering a wide range of interests.
• The English Research Page
• Google - British Literature  - Directory listing of higher quality websites
• Literary Awards - Links to many literary awards from Amazon.com

• Literary Resources - A collection of links to sites on the Internet dealing especially with English and American literature from U Penn
• Modern British Literature - Lists of links from the British Library
• The Modern British Literature Index
• The Orlando Project - The Orlando Project is a collaborative undertaking for writing the first full scholarly history of women's writing in the British Isles
• Post Colonial Web - From the National University of Singapore
• The Voice of the Shuttle -  The Website for Humanities, large directory

 

Research Tips

• Clearly identify your information need
• Identify key words and search terms to match your topic
• Develop search statements using advanced search techniques
  • Boolean logic, adjacency searching and truncation
• Use the Online Catalog to find books
• Use Education and Arts & Humanities article  databases to find journal articles
• Go back to the online catalog to see if the journals are in Stewart Library and where they are located
• Use Interlibrary loan to get materials that are not in Stewart Library
• Use search engines to find Web information
• Carefully evaluate the information you find for usefulness and quality
• Revise your search terms and strategy to expand or narrow your results, be creative, look in other areas
• Once you have found information from an Internet site you can Email the documents to yourself, print or save them to a floppy disk 
• Use appropriate style to document and cite research
• Ask for HELP at  Reference, via phone or email

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