Research Guides: English: Literature Resources

Literature Articles

Oxford African American Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Reference works focusing on the lives and events that have shaped African American and African history and culture.
Literary Reference Source Plus This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive database that provides a broad spectrum of information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and time frames.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
An index to books and articles published on modern languages, literature, folklore, and linguistics, includes literature from all over the world.
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting for over 1,900 titles, and full text of hundreds of journals books and other publications in the humanities.

Modern Language Association (MLA)
Homepage of the Modern Language Association. Includes a language map of the United States.

20th Century African-American Poetry
20th Century African-American Poetry contains 12,000 poems by more than 100 African-American poets, including Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Rita Dove, and emerging poets. Biographical profiles accompany each poets work.
20th Century American Poetry
Contains 52,000 poems from collected works and individual volumes of poetry covering the works of most major twentieth-century American poets.
20th Century English Poetry
20th Century English Poetry contains over 44,000 poems by 288 poets, incorporating the Modern Poetry Collection and The Faber Poetry Library.
African-American Poetry 1760-1900
African-American Poetry 1760-1900 includes the full text of almost 3000 poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Early American Fiction
Contains 440 works of 80 novelists and short-story writers, 1774-1850.

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
An easy to use resource for starting your research. Provides background information from dictionaries and encyclopedias on a wide array of topics ranging from Art to Technology. Wiki alternative

Critical Insights
Resources for a select list of authors and titles
Literature Reference Books
Includes Poetry for Students, Short Stories for Students, Novels for Students, Black Literature Criticism, Drama for Students and much more
Masterplots
A classic reference work for more than sixty years, Masterplots analyzes the most important works in all genres—long fiction, short fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction—throughout history and around the world, helping to define and critique the literary canon.

Folger Library Digital Texts
Free access to Shakespeare plays and poems from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Texts may be read online or downloaded in multiple formats (including HTML, PDF, DOC, TXT).