Literature 309A: American Literature I (Cucinella)

The purpose of this guide is to familiarize you with sources in the library and on the internet useful for literary and literature research as you create your annotated bibliographies and analytical essays.

Getting Started

What do you need?

Annotated Bibliography requires TEN full length sources (minimum) with short paragraph descriptions:

These can be books, book chapters, scholarly journal articles
THREE must be from print sources rather than online

Paper #1 requires research one author OR poet from the syllabus:

Biographical information
Place in literary history
Discussion of major works and themes

Paper #2 builds on Paper #1 with the addition of:

Critical reception by others, note this can be contemporary to the writer's time as well as modern interpretation
your critical analysis of the work, be sure your research findings agree with your analysis!
Bibliographic list of works by and about this writer (use your annotated bibliography as a beginning and add to it!)

IMPORTANT! You need to search beyond the author and title of your chosen work! Look for questions that arise from your reading. Think about the author of your work: why did they write this book, what were culture and society like during the time this was written, what were others writing at the same time and how has time regarded this work?

Look for relevant terms and personal names in your notes and readings to broaden your search strategies. To broaden further, think of alternate terms to the ones you discover. As it is advisable to do some beginning research on your proposed ideas to be sure appropriate and sufficient resources are available before committing much time or effort on a topic, consider your bibliographies the means to do this exploration.

Books

Any well researched project uses books to support your thinking and writing. There are two kinds of books you can investigate in the library--reference and circulating. To find them, either do:

KEYWORD searches using terms from your class readings and notes,
TITLE searches for specific works by their exact title,
AUTHOR searches for those who have been identified as authorities on a topic, or
SUBJECT searches on your author, another person, or topic. (Subject headings can be tricky, so feel free to ask for help.) Some possible subject searches:
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896 (Note last name, first name order when searching a person)
- Rowson, Mrs., 1762-1824 -- Criticism And Interpretation (analysis of this particular author's body of work, also note the lack of first name due to naming conventions of her time.)
- Cooper, James Fenimore, 1789-1851 --Characters -- Women (specific analysis of one aspect of author's work)
- American Literature -- Puritan Authors -- History And Criticism (culture study in terms of literature)
- Romanticism -- United States (study of a genre or other aspect as a group, rather than a specific work)
- Authors, American (authors as a ethnic, geographic, cultural or other group)
- Authors, American -- 19th Century -- Biography (specific regional and temporal division)

Reference Books (in library use)

These are works like encyclopedias, directories, and collections of reviews that do not circulate from the library. They may be quick overviews or in-depth studies and are frequently useful for short facts or overviews, birthdates, statistics and bibliographies of sources. There are a number of useful resources mentioned in Baker and Huling's Research Guide for Undergraduate Students which is held at CSUSM. Some additional useful sources are:

Literature Criticism From 1400 to 1800* (at REF PN 86 .L56, use the last volume's index to determine where your author is included in the set)
Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism* (at REF PN 761 .N56, use the last volume's index to determine where your author is included in the set)
American Writers (REF PS 129 .A55) contains entries on a variety of American writers, check the index of the final supplement as there can be entries in several volumes.
Dictionary of Literary Biography* (this set is broken up in the reference stacks by author type such as 'Nathaniel Hawthorne' at REF PS1881 .N38 2003.)

*Note: Gale, the publisher for these series and others, has placed a free comprehensive index to all their sets on the web. See this page for author, title or custom search. Once you know the series title and volume number, you can check our catalog for the location. Keep in mind, CSUSM does not own all the series indexed, but we do have the major sets.

Circulating Books (check out and take home)

Find books on your topic by using KEYWORD or subject searches. Some books are now available in full text through the catalog. When you see a WWW connection offered, click on that link to read the book online (access is in 2 hour increments.)

Other Options

Circuit (1-3 day delivery)
Search the collections of other San Diego area libraries -- about 3,000,000 books. Find and request books directly online; pick them up at our Library in 1-3 days.

WorldCat (5-10 day delivery)
Search the collections of libraries world-wide -- about 52,000,000 books. Find a book in this database, and fill-out an Interlibrary Loan delivery request. The book will be delivered to the Library for pickup.

Journal Articles

Literature journals include some of the latest research in the field and can be very helpful in your project. They are a good source for finding very detailed information on your topic. To find articles, you need to start with a research database and preferably one that indexes scholarly sources as they are based on careful research and peer-reviewed prior to publishing. NOTE: most databases do not cover material published prior to the early 1980's, so you may need to use print resources. Some databases do not offer full text of the articles. Use the button to check our other resources for full text. Interlibrary Loan is available for documents that we don't own.

Most Useful

MLA
(AKA Bibliography of the Modern Language Association.) Includes abstracts of articles from critical literary and language journals. THE source for literature criticism and analysis.

JSTOR
Full-text. Contains complete full-text back files (EXCEPT for the latest five years) of core scholarly journals in such areas as sociology, history, economics, political science, mathematics, African-American studies, Asian studies and others. This collection offers articles published since the late 1800's.

Project MUSE
Full text. Scholarly article collection supplementing the holdings on many titles in JSTOR by offering more currently published materials.

Contemporary Authors
Biographies and bibliographies of 90,000 authors in the U.S. and around the world.

Twayne's Authors Series
This series provides literary criticism for approximately 600 authors, including critical introductions to the lives and works of writers, the history and influence of literary movements, or the development of literary genres.

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Informative introduction to major people and ideas in the world of literary theory and criticism.

Also Useful

America: History & Life
Abstracts of journal articles covering American & Canadian history, from pre-history to the present.

Oxford English Dictionary
A guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It includes etymological analysis, listings of variant spellings, and shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Academic Search Premier (via EbscoHost)
Full-text. A multi-disciplinary database offering full text for nearly 1,850 scholarly journals, including more than 1,250 peer-reviewed titles. Use peer-reviewed limiter to focus on more scholarly materials.

WorldCat
The world's most comprehensive bibliography, with 40 million records representing 400 languages. Covers mostly books, showing the libraries that own each individual title.

Online Resources

There are ways to search the internet quickly and effectively. Use Advanced or Expert Search whenever possible to focus your results and eliminate sites you can't use like those in languages you cannot read.

Limit your searches to high quality domains: .edu (university servers), or .org (museums and associations)
Use appropriate language to accurately describe your topic.
Spell names or phrases accurately--be aware of alternate spellings used in different translations.
Look for bibliographies or references to the works used for the site's contents.
Know your topic!
Carefully evaluate what you find for bias, conflicting, or incomplete information.

Some of the better sources on the internet:

American Trancendentalism Web
PAL: Perspectives on American Literature: Romanticism
Literature: Antebellum America (1794-1865) links to several authors studied in this course
Voice of the Shuttle (Literatures in English) A massive collection of web sites, a search of the entire site can be overwhelming, so a link to one important subset is offered here.
Library of Congress Classification Outline (where are your subject areas in the CSUSM library?)

Style Guides

As you write your paper, you'll need to cite passages and ideas from the sources you've found. In order to cite your resources properly, you need to follow the style guide used by for this class, the MLA Handbook.

Link to page on citing from the CLC and other reprint collections

Sites with examples of in-text citations and works cited pages.

MLA Quick Summary of Bibliography
In-text citing and works cites examples.