Q. Where can I find some literary criticism of O. Henry's 'The Gift of the Magi'?

We have several databases that are ideal for researching literature and finding literary criticism and they all have scholarly articles as well as other types of sources in some cases. They cover American, British and World authors. Here are our top databases (login with your COM account for off campus access):

JSTOR
Great for finding scholarly articles with criticism. Probably has the most criticism articles of all our databases. 

1. Start by searching with the title of your work. Quotes around a title of a work can really help. 
2. You can use the Refine Results options to limit your results to the most relevant articles. 
   • Under Academic content, try Journals
   • Under Subject, try Language & Literature
   • Under Language try English 
3. Once you find an article you like you can find Related text on the article page, where you may find even more articles that you can use. Try the Navigate the Article Page in How to Use JSTOR if you aren't sure where to find it. 

ProQuest One Community College
Great for finding scholarly articles with criticism. You may find more recent articles here than in JSTOR. 

1. Start off your search by entering an author or specific work (with quotes around the title)  in the search box. 
2. Under Subject, choose literary criticism as subject.
3. Under Person, choose your author.
4. You can easily narrow down to academic, peer reviewed or scholarly sources if your instructor requires it by selecting Peer reviewed under the search box.
5. You can learn more about using this and other ProQuest databases in How to Use ProQuest. 

Gale Literature
Includes articles and Gale eBooks. 

1. Type the title of a specific work or the author in the search box. It will make auto suggestions as you type; choose the one that matches and hit enter.
2. The result list is already narrowed down to literature criticism by default. This databases does have other kinds of content like work overviews but the criticism is what you want.
3. On the right side of the screen you have options for narrowing down more by subject, author, peer reviewed and more. You can even search within the results. Usually the best options if to look under subjects or search within your result list.

OneSearch
Great for finding books and eBooks with criticism as well as articles. 

1. To get started you can do a search by entering the specific work that you are researching, with quotes around the title, like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and select everything to search. 
2. Under Subject, choose Show More, select Literary Criticism and Apply filters. 
3. If you need peer reviewed articles you can easily narrow it down to by selecting Peer-reviewed Journals under Availability.
4. Narrow down by date by entering the desired date range and selecting Refine. 
5. You can learn more about what you can do in OneSearch in How to Use OneSearch. 

You can find all of these databases plus a few more on the A-Z Databases: Literary Criticism page. Get Tips for Finding Literary Criticism. 

Did you know? Our databases provide citations!
How you get them varies for each platform, but it's easy once you know how. Go to the Grab a Citation page in the Cite APA Style and Cite MLA Style guides to get step by step instructions with screen shots.