Answered By: John Salinas
Last Updated: Dec 15, 2023     Views: 299

The best place to find articles on works of literature is in our literary criticism databases. You can go to A-Z databases: Literary Criticism to access all our databases with criticism, but the ones below are your best bets. For more, go to Tips for Finding Literary Criticism.

Literary Sources

  1. Type in your author's work to get the most relevant results.
  2. Once you have a result list you will see criticism listed first, those are the articles you can use for your paper.
  3. On the right side of the screen you have options for narrowing down by content type, subject, author, and more. Usually the best options if to look under subjects or search within your result list. You can even search within the results if needed.
  4. Use the Peer-Reviewed Journals options to limit to peer reviewed articles. 

Literature & Language

  1. Type in your author's work to get the most relevant results.
  2. Once you have a result list, find Subject on the left side and select literary criticism.
  3. You can review subject options again and narrow more if needed.
  4. Under Limit to, you can limit to Peer reviewed

Literary Reference Center

  1. To get started you can do a search by entering an author or specific work.
  2. On the result list under source types, choose Literary Criticism.
  3. Under Subject, choose the poem, short story, novel or play as a subject. You could try the author or a character too, depending on the theme of your paper.
  4. If you need peer reviewed articles you'll need to start from the Advanced Search page and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals under Limit your results.

Tips

  • Use quotes around the title of the author's work will help get you more relevant results. For example "Annabel Lee".
  • Don't forget to grab your MLA style citation from the databases for your paper! 

And don't forget books!

Books and eBooks can be a great source for literature criticism.

OneSearch for Print Books

  1. Go to Advanced Search in OneSearch
  2. Type in the author or the title of the poem/story/novel in the first filed, and use Any field menu to select subject
  3. Type in criticism in the 2nd field and hit search. 
  4. In the Refine my results options, select Held by library to narrow down print books. 

Gale eBooks

  • Click on the literature category on the from page, then search within literature to find your author or specific work.

Ebook Central

EBook Central has lots of eBooks with literary criticism, but on many other topics as well.

  1. Type in your author's work to get the most relevant results.
  2. Once you have a result list, find Subject on the left side and select literature
  3. We do have some Spanish language books, so you can also narrow down to just English under Language if you like.
  4. You can review subject options again and narrow more if needed.

Salem Online eBooks

Salem Online has a great collection of literary criticism by author, work or theme.

  • Browse under literature for your author/authors' work to see all criticism for that author/authors' work.

EBSCO eBooks

  • You can use the same techniques here you’d use in any EBSCO databases. Click on Subject and see what options most closely match topic and select.

Answers by Topic

Have Great Spring Break!

Have a Great Spring Break!

COM Library is closed for Spring Break, but you can still: stream a movie on Swankread a great eBook in Libby, or listen to an audiobook on Hoopla. All free to COM students, faculty and staff, available 24/7!

And all our great online academic eBooksstreaming videos from great producers like A&EHBO or PBS and article databases are still there if you need them. :)

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