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Guide to Literature Resources

The following is a selected list of resources for CSUSM courses in Literature. For further assistance, contact Judith Downie, Humanities Librarian.

Journal Articles -- Literature

To look for articles in journals, you will need to start with a research database. The following databases provide full text or abstracts of articles from thousands of journals and other sources. You can also browse a list of individual electronic journals for literature.

Some databases such as MLA do not offer full text of the articles. Use the Check SFX for Availability button to check our other resources for full text.

Most Useful

Project Muse
Full-text coverage for hundreds of scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics
Coverage: 1993→current

JSTOR
Contains (EXCEPT for the latest five years) core scholarly journals in sociology, history, economics, political science, mathematics, African-American & Asian studies, literature, humanities, music, and biological, health & general sciences.
Coverage: 1838→2004

MLA
Includes abstracts of articles from critical literary and language journals.
Coverage: 1963→current

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

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.
Coverage: current

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

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
Coverage: current

Also Useful

Accessible Archives
A good source for 19th Century American History; includes newspapers on the Civil War and African Americans.
Coverage: 1728→1900

Arts and Letters Daily
Compilation of opinion pieces on current events and book reviews.
Coverage: 1998→current

Chicano Database
Abstracts for books, journal articles and other material about Mexican-Americans.
Coverage: 1900→current

Dissertations and Theses Database
Dissertations and Theses Database includes digitized dissertations in a variety of subject areas including Art, Communications, Education, History, Linguistics, Literature, and Social Sciences.
Coverage: 1979→current

eScholarship
A collection of more than 60 e-books covering international studies, European history and literature. Provided by the California Digital Library and the University of California Press.
Coverage: 1991→current

HAPI: Hispanic American Periodicals Index
Indexes journals from 1970 on providing information about Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean and Hispanics in the United States.
Coverage: 1970→current

ScienceDirect
Provides full text access to over 1,000 journals covering all fields of science.
Coverage: 1995→current

Victorian Women Writers Project
Features the works of British women from the Victorian period (1830-1910), including anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama.
Coverage: 1830→1910

Wright American Fiction
A collection of nearly 3,000 19th Century American fiction books, available online in full-text.
Coverage: 1851→1875

Books

Not everything is available on the Internet, and as old-fashioned as it may seem, the best place to begin your research is in your library's collection -- Really! A lot of time and money is spent on collecting the best for your courses -- especially if you are feeling overwhelmed by the project. To search for books, you need to use a library catalog. Depending on how much time you have, you have a couple of options for extending your search.

Books at Cal State San Marcos

Library Catalog
Search our local collection of about 250,000 books.

How to Search the Catalog
The simplest way to get started is by using the default KEYWORD search. Type in one or two words about your topic (examples are: magical realism, postcolonial, feminist literature) to begin your search.

Once you have a list of results (these are book and journal titles), click on likely titles to view the entire record.

For more precise searching, look at the SUBJECTS on items that meet your research needs and follow those links to find other works on your topic that don't necessarily use the same terminology that you did in the keyword search. An example is a broad keyword search on feminist authors, with a large number of items (145!) returned on all sorts of women writers. But then you find the subject heading Autobiography--Women Authors which is really more appropriate as you can narrow the paper to women writing about their own feminist views and by clicking on that subject heading, you have 46 titles to look at.

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. Books will be delivered to Library for pickup.

Browse the Book Stacks
Sometimes, just looking through the shelves can turn up works you would not have considered otherwise. Using the Library of Congress subject system, Literature is shelved in the P call number area. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia provides a list of the subclasses in the P area so you can see how this is organized.

Reference Books
These are a special category and while included in the library catalog, may NOT have the level of detail in the catalog record to really help you in finding what you need. This is where talking to a librarian will help you a lot!

One example are the literature criticism series published by Gale. There are over 20 different sets, that have new volumes added to the shelf at various times and thousands of authors and titles. How do you know where to look and what is in each series that might be helpful to you? The library catalog cannot provide that level of detail, so use the online (and free) GALE LITERARY INDEX that allows you to search by name, work's title, or custom settings (nationality, birth year, etc.) The search results will list every Gale series that has your research topic. Then you just need to find what the location (call number) is for the sets owned by CSUSM and refer to the volume numbers you found in the index. A librarian knows about these tools and tricks and can help you find and use them!

Online Resources

CSUSM LTWR home page
CSUSM Writing Center

Other quality resources on the web

Free Fulltext

Tutorials & Tools

Tutorials

Tools

  • Bartleby.com provides free access to reference, verse, fiction and non-fiction works
  • Elements of Style (Strunk, 1918, 1999 through Bartleby.com)
  • Gale Literary Index a free-access index to the contents of the Gale Group Publishers collections of literary criticism and biographical information (Dictionary of Literary Criticism, Nineteenth Century Criticism and much more)
  • Online Writery (University of Missouri-Columbia)

Citing Your Sources

As you write your papers in LTWR courses, you'll need to cite passages and ideas from the sources you've found. You may find the following sites useful to supplement Keys for Writers and the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

Professional Resources

Literary Market Place
Listings for publishers, agents, manufacturers and other businesses associated with publishing. Free users have access to partial content of the full resource found in Library Reference at PN161 .L5

Writer's Market
Similar to LMP with more orientation to the writer, rather than publisher. Of special note are tips to novice and experienced professional writers and a glossary of terms used in the writing profession (See "encyclopedia" link.) (Full resource in Library Reference at PN161 .W83)

Organizations, Listservs & Blogs

Organizations

Listservs

Blogs