LibGuides: American Literature I: Beginnings through 1865: Home

Find scholarly sources on all topics

Go to the Library web page, enter your topic in the center search box and GO!

►Search results will include books & ebooks, book chapters & articles (mostly scholarly), videos, and other sources.
►Refine search results by checking format, content, topic, etc.
►Books & articles available electronically will usually (but not always!) have a View Now button.
►Use the Request Item Through Interlibrary Loan button to get books & articles that are not part of Memorial Library's collection. The link will automatically fill in the request form for you once you've set up an ILLiad account.

Find literary criticism & biography

Literary Reference Center is a great resource to use for thorough research on literary topics - writers, genres, time periods, etc.

►Results will include the full text of credible secondary sources -- journal & encyclopedia articles, excerpts from books, news articles & book reviews.
►Most results also include the full text of primary sources -- period articles, book reviews, and interviews.
►Use quotation marks around the name if results include too many unrelated sources.

Literary Reference Center Plus This link opens in a new window
Full text database that combines information from respected reference works, books, and literary journals. Includes literary criticism, author biographies, book reviews, author interviews and images of key literary figures.
A full-text database that combines information from major reference works, books, and literary journals as well as original content from EBSCO. Literary Reference Center includes thousands of plot summaries, synopses, and work overviews; articles of literary criticism; author biographies; full-text literary journals; book reviews; classic and contemporary poems and short stories; classic novels; author interviews; and images of key literary figures.

Reference sources include:
• Beacham's Research Guide to Biography and Criticism (six volumes)
• The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story
• Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature
• Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature
• Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature
• The Literary Encyclopedia
• The complete Magill On Literature Plus
• Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature
• The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
• The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature

Coverage Dates: 1912 - present
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Search for scholarly content across academic disciplines, from all countries, and in all languages.

Set up Google Scholar for Off Campus Access to Berry Subscriptions
Because Google Scholar also extracts and presents citations, search results may include citations to older works that appear only in books or other offline publications.
ProQuest ONE Literature This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
A full-text literature library, including biographical sketches of major writers, selected bibliographies, and critical and reference works.
ProQuest One Literature is for scholars who must engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research and course planning. It contains 5 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings.

Coverage Dates: 600 A.D.- present
MLA International Bibliography with Full Text This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
The gold standard for finding scholarly journal articles on literary topics.
A detailed bibliography of journal articles, books, and dissertations plus 1,000 full text journals, such as Applied Linguistics, Critique, Comparative Literature, Renaissance Quarterly and College Composition & Communication. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4,400 journals & series, and 1,000 book publishers. Subjects consist of literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory & criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory, and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. In addition to the bibliography, the database includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals; the association's proprietary thesaurus used to assign descriptors to each record in the bibliography; and a proprietary, searchable directory of noted authors' names, with links to brief descriptive notes.

Coverage Dates: 1920s - present