Includes the full text of many volumes of Bloomsbury's "Cultural History" series (with such sets as Food, Memory, Emotions, Plants, Gardens, Race, the Sea, the Senses, etc.).
These guides "offer lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods... It is fully searchable by author, title, topic, or theme (Cambridge University Press)." Rice University has access to the full collection through 2023.
● Over 25 years of content
● Over 600 titles
● 4,000 essays
● Frequent updates include new and original editions
● Tools enable teaching and learning
● Searchable via metadata and fulltext
● Reference linking
● Scholarship is regularly updated with new editions with original versions still available
(Cambridge University Press)
Complete online versions of the Cambridge UP "In Context" series, edited collections giving historical, cultural and personal background for major literary figures including Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, George Eliot, Blake, etc.
Search and read online dozens of volumes of literary history from Cambridge UP. Includes histories of numerous genres, periods and geographical areas in literature. Part of the larger Cambridge Histories collection.
Containing over 1,000 of the most troublesome literary terms encountered by students and general readers. Terms from languages and literature other than English are given, as are pronunciation guides for over 200 difficult terms.
"The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature spans the full sweep of literary genres, figures, and global contexts that define this influential period, blending accessibility with an unmatched breadth of coverage and authoritative scholarship. It comprises over 330 fully cross-referenced entries, combining in-depth omnibus essays exploring major topics, including the novel, plays, poetry, and global Victorian studies, with succinct articles on themes such as cosmopolitanism, journalism, race, sexuality, and reading."
Firms Out of Business is a database with information about vanished publishing concerns, literary agencies, and similar firms. From the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin and the University of Reading Library.
Search across several full-text literature reference and article resources, including Contemporary Authors, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Literature Criticism Online (particularly useful for primary-source historical criticism) and the Literature Resource Center.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism is compiled from over 275 specialists and provides a historical survey of the field's important figures, schools, and movements.
These introductions and section-by-section explanations of important texts are a great head start for analyzing and discussing class readings. This link takes you to the complete set of 233; add a title or author name to the search bar to find a specific title. You can also retrieve them by searching for "ProQuest Study Guides" in the Literature Online (LION) database.
This open-source text is the final (6th, 2014) edition of the standard guide to literary information sources by James Harner, updated by Angela Courtney. Learn about the contents, strengths and limitations of all kinds of literary research resources.
Literature Online's reference works include biographies, bibliographies, Cambridge Companions to Literature, Penguin Introductions (from the Penguin Classics series), KnowledgeNotes Student Guides (which provide detailed but easy-to-understand notes on important texts), and numerous dictionaries and encyclopedias. Use the "Reference Works" tab on the main search page, or search for an author.
Read overviews and annotated bibliographies for over 170 topics and major figures in American literature. These are very useful introductions to the significant literature in a wide variety of subject areas, and part of a larger collection covering many disciplines.
Read overviews and annotated bibliographies for over 150 topics and major figures in British and Irish literature. These are very useful introductions to the significant literature in a wide variety of subject areas, and part of a larger collection covering many disciplines.
"Cinema and media studies includes a dizzying array of subfields: film history, television studies, media studies, critical theory, visual arts, cultural studies, digital culture, game studies, popular culture, and the study of the moving image... Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies has recruited many of the finest scholars in cinema and media studies to chart a path through the information thicket and toward a carefully organized, thoroughly peer-reviewed account of the most important books, articles, and Web sites (Oxford University Press)."
Literary theory has become the hegemonic methodology for the study of text and is often regarded both as a sub-discipline in itself and as a critical tool through which to liberate deeper and more complex meanings from texts. Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory offers clearly-signposted pathways through the different areas, and will make clear references to the other disciplines which feed in to, and are often transformed by, literary theory (Oxford University Press).
The Victorian period, which encompasses the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901, is often regarded as a high point in literary history, generating a wealth of material that is still regarded as canonical as well as a diverse range of literary genres. Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature offers a reliable, up-to-date, and authoritative guide to the best literature in the field (Oxford Univ. Press).
Search dozens of handbooks in the field of literature, each full of chapters giving scholarly overviews of important topics in the field. If results are too mixed with other subject areas, you can use the subject filters on the left-hand pane of the results page.
Fondren's access:
Archaeology: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Classical Studies: 2009-2012 Foundation and the 2012-2022 Collections;
Criminology and Criminal Justice: 2009-2012 Foundation and 2013-2022 Collections;
History: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Law: 2009-2012 Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Linguistics: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Literature: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Music: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Neuroscience: 2021-2023 Collections;
Philosophy: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Physical Sciences: 2017, 2018 and 2019 Collections;
Political Science: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Psychology: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Religion: Foundation and the 2012-2023 Collections;
Social Work: 2023 and
Sociology: 2017-2023 Collections.
Online access to "a compendium of the finest critical thinking about the broad concept of literature available around the world (Oxford University Press).
Premium Collection contains over 200 dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. It is a fully-indexed, cross-searchable database of these books, giving subscribers unprecedented access to a comprehensive information resource. Includes added functionality and more detailed information across a broad subject range from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions Series.
"Provides the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject including history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, and critical terms." This is the 2012 edition, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, in a searchable online format. The entire book is downloadable as a PDF through De Gruyter UPL: https://onesearch.library.rice.edu/permalink/01RICE_INST/1ktd9v9/alma991033773391505251
Designed as a tool to support students of the humanities and social sciences, this database introduces the key approaches to working with source materials and historical evidence (Adam Matthew).
This database contains the full text (in html format) of hundreds of books and and articles on social theory, ranging from Marx and Engels, Gilman, Mead, Durkheim and Addams to de Beauvoir, Adorno, Foucault, Baudrillard, Habermas and many more. Most sources are in their original languages but many have been translated. The database is especially useful for keyword searching in this subject area, and for having always-available access to major texts. Click Browse > Sources for the list of books; you can also browse “theories".
Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders is a database of copyright contacts for writers, artists, and prominent figures in other creative fields. From the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin and the University of Reading Library.
The following E-Reference Books are available:
● Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory;
● Companion to World Literature;
● Encyclopedia of British Literature, 1660-1789;
● Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature;
● Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain;
● Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies;
● Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature;
● Encyclopedia of the Gothic;
● Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction;
● Encyclopedia of the Novel; and
● Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature.
"Green’s Dictionary of Slang [covers] five centuries of innovation in all English-speaking regions of the world, the Dictionary is the most authoritative, scholarly approach to slang ever attempted. Over 100,000 words are defined; each word is authenticated by genuine and full-referenced citations of its use."
Offers "a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED"
The OED: provides authoritative definitions of over 500,000 words, traces the usage of words from their first recorded occurrence to the modern period through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international language sources, and offers etymological analysis and detailed listings of variant spelling.
Presented by the Hobby Foundation Endowment Fund.
Spelling, history, and usage of thousands of foreign words and phrases used by English speakers. There are words from more than forty languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yiddish. Terms from cooking, fashion, and music jostle with others from fine arts, history, law, politics, business, and travel in this great reference to words from around the globe.
Definitions of Shakespeare's words with references to his works. This is the 1986 revision by Robert Eagleson of the classic work by CT Onions. Available online in the LION database.
This database includes cultural references, conversational practices, important themes, regional accents and foreign languages encountered in Shakespeare's plays. It also includes a thesaurus of all glossary words, an audio dimension to the glossary words in both modern and original pronunciation as well as information about scene lengths and the size of character parts (Crystal Business Partnership).
Biographical treatments for significant American figures. An "American" is loosely defined as someone whose significant actions occurred during his or her residence within what is now the United States or whose life or career directly influenced the course of American history. The only invariant rule is that all subjects must have died prior to 1996. Online version updated quarterly with new articles and illustrations.
Indexes current and retrospective reference sources, such as biographical dictionaries, subject encyclopedias, and indexes. Contains citations to over 13 million biographical sketches from multiple reference works that cover individuals, both living and deceased, from every field of activity and from all areas of the world.
Contains brief biographies of important authors, plot summaries of individual works, descriptions of important literary movements, and a wealth of information on other aspects of American literary life and history from the Colonial period to the modern era. It devotes approximately 325 of the biographical entries to contemporary writers, such as William Kennedy, Grace Paley, and Raymond Carver.
This collection is "a biographical and bibliographical guide to current writers in all fields including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, journalism, drama, television and movies. Includes the most recent data on the world's most-popular authors... Each volume contains approximately 250 writers (Gale)."
Search across several full-text literature reference and article resources, including Contemporary Authors, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Literature Criticism Online (particularly useful for primary-source historical criticism) and the Literature Resource Center.
Comprehensive guide to modern poetry in English. There is worldwide coverage, including America, Britain and Ireland, New Zealand, Trinidad and Zimbabwe. There are also entries on magazines, movements, and critical terms.