Research Guides: Literature Research Guide: Start your Research Here

What's in this Guide?

Start your Research Here!

This Guide is Designed to Give You:

Key starting points for your research
Other potential resources in Literature Research
Tips & strategies

How to Use this Guide:

Start with the resources on this page, or use the tabs above to navigate throughout the rest of this guide.

Top Research Databases

Humanities Full Text This link opens in a new window
Includes scholarly articles from many humanities journals, as well as interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, & original works of fiction, drama, & reviews. .
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides full text of hundreds of journals, books and other published sources from around the world.
Literary Reference Center Plus
Literary Reference Center Plus is a comprehensive database that provides a broad spectrum of information on thousands of authors and their literary works, including articles, biographies, and reviews.
JSTOR (Arts and Sciences Collections III and V) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to articles in back issues of the core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
MLA International Bibliography is an index to books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage includes literature from all over the world.

Other topics include literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts (film, radio, television, theater), and history of printing and publishing.

Additional literary works are available online from our Databases for English as well as Quick Reference: Literature.

Or choose other databases from the Library's Databases page.

Use these databases to get full-text literature:

20th Century African-American Poetry This link opens in a new window
This database contains 12,000 poems by more than 100 African-American poets, with biographical profiles. Now offered as part of the American and English Literature Collection.
American & English Literature: Poetry, Drama and Prose This link opens in a new window
Contains many works of poetry, drama, and prose, based on books and other sources originally published in print.
American Drama This link opens in a new window
Currently contains more than 700 plays from over 300 dramatists of American dramatic literature.
American poetry Database : APD This link opens in a new window
A collection of books and anthologies of early American poetry from the 17th to the early 20th century.
Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare This link opens in a new window
The complete text of eleven major editions of Shakespeare's works from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, twenty four separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha and related works and more than 100 adaptations, sequels, and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
English Prose Drama This link opens in a new window
Contains more than 1,800 plays by approximately 400 authors from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century.
English Verse Drama This link opens in a new window
Contains poetry intended for the stage from the Shrewsbury Fragments of the late 13th century through the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods to the end of the 19th century.

Video Tutorials

EBSCO Databases: Advanced Searching (2-min video)
Literary Reference Center - Tutorial (4-min video)
Working with your EBSCO Results List
Find out how to limit your results by (a) what kind of article you need & (b) what time frame you need, as well as how to sort, save, & link back to your searches!

Step-by-Step Guides

EBSCO Databases: Reading your Results