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Literary Criticism Locator

  1. Search the LITERATURE RESOURCE CENTER (Gale) database.
    • Author Search includes a Literary Criticism link for the 2,400 "most studied" authors, with links to full-text articles from periodicals and reference books.
    • For many more authors, there is an Articles link, which searches for full-text articles in Gale's Searchbank / Infotrac database (a.k.a. General Interest Magazines (Searchbank)). Some articles are from scholarly literary journals.
    • Another link accesses MLA International Bibliography, which goes back to 1963 and includes references to chapters in books as well as to articles in hundreds of literary journals, with full-text to articles included in Searchbank. NOTE: It is usually best to search MLA separately from the rest of LRC, because authors included in MLA but not in the rest of LRC will not be retrieved with an LRC Author Search.
  2. Search the GENERAL INTEREST MAGAZINES WITH IMAGES (UMI) database (a.k.a. ProQuest).
    • Probably the best source for recent (last five years) full-text literary criticism; this general magazine index includes the full text of a number of the major literary journals.
    • Limiting your search to "full text" and "peer reviewed" articles will eliminate magazines like NEWSWEEK, though there will still be book reviews from professional journals like LIBRARY JOURNAL.
  3. Search the HUMANITIES ABSTRACTS (H. W. Wilson) database, listed under DATABASES / LITERATURE on the LAPL Home Page.
    • Though many of the indexed journals are only abstracted, there are quite a few recent full-text literature criticism articles included, some of which are not in Literature Resource Center or ProQuest.
  4. Search the DISCOVERING AUTHORS (Gale) database, also listed under DATABASES / LITERATURE on the Home Page.
    • Only the "most studied authors" are included in this database.
    • Though DISCOVERING AUTHORS is aimed at younger students, it does include links to literary criticism, some of which do not overlap with Literature Resource Center. Many of the articles are excerpts, but some run three to five pages in length.
  5. Call the LITERATURE/FICTION DEPARTMENT at (213) 228-7345. If we can locate critiques of your author or literary work, we can generally FAX you ONE OR TWO fairly brief articles, assuming they're not on microfilm. We can check:
    • Bibliographies listing criticism of specific short stories and poems (often difficult to locate otherwise).
    • Books about individual authors.
    • More specialized print-format Gale criticism volumes (examples: Medieval authors; authors 1500-1800; Asian-American authors).

 

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