Literary Criticism: Recommended Resources
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowIndexes journal articles, book chapters and more in literature, language development, linguistics and folklore; with abstracts.
Dates Covered: 1926-present.
Use MLA to find articles and book chapters related to literary criticism. Note that MLA includes a variety of publications and formats in its indexing, as well as spans over 100 years. Overtime, the nature of literary criticism has changed and increased in complexity. I recommend consulting with your professor for suggestions if you aren't sure which article to use.
Note that MLA most often doesn't contain the full-text; you'll need to use the Find Full Text at DePaul option to locate the actual article or link to our holdings for a book.
See the MLA Search Tips tab for additional help.
Books are a great resource for literary criticism. Note that you may not necessarily use an entire book for your research. You may only use a single chapter or essay. Many academic books are edited compilations of articles or pieces by different authors. If you are looking for literary criticism, you'll want to be sure that you are using scholarly books. A partial list of reputable scholarly publishers is available on the DePaul VuFind (Books) Tips tab on the side navigation.
All books related to literature can be found on the 4th floor of the John T. Richardson Library.
- Literature Criticism (Gale) This link opens in a new window
Literature Criticism Online contains different types of information, including reprinted literary criticism. It can be a good source for literary criticism because they try to include representative key pieces of literary criticism related to an author's work. A few caveats:
- Make sure that what you are looking at is literary criticism. Unfortunately, sometimes book reviews are labeled as literary criticism.
- Some of the reprinted criticism is actually only excerpts. If something is an excerpt, it will be indicated at the top of the entry. You should not use excerpts. Instead, you'll want to locate the original article.
- If you do use a piece of reprinted (complete) criticism from Literature Criticism Online, you will want to be sure to cite it as having come from Literature Criticism Online. If you use the built in citing feature, it will provide you with the correct information for your citation.
Additional Resources
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Unlike most databases, JSTOR allows you to search the full text of an article. This can be useful if you are looking for articles that discuss a less known work or a single poem. Note that you do not need to search JSTOR if you have found what you need in MLA. MLA includes records for all of the articles in JSTOR, but does not search the full text of the articles. - Project MUSE This link opens in a new windowProject Muse is similar to JSTOR in that it also allows you to search the full text of articles.
- Google ScholarIn Google Scholar, DePaul users can select Settings in the top right corner and click on Library links in the left-hand column. Search for DePaul, select the four options that appear and scroll down to save your settings. (You need to do this only once for each browser you use.) Now your Google Scholar search results will show Find full-text@DePaul -- click the link to see which DePaul databases include the article you need. (If there's no Find full-text link, use the DePaul Library Holdings link under the citation instead). If you do not see the word ARTICLE in all caps, current students, faculty and staff may request the article using the Interlibrary Loan service.