ENG210: Introduction to Literary Studies

• The Start Your Research Here box does a broad, shallow search across 100 library databases: 30,000 books, 200,000 ebooks, millions of articles, and thousands of videos.  
• Use Advanced Search to overlap ideas with AND. See examples below.
• Limit results to E-books, Print Books, Articles or Videos as needed. Use Peer-Reviewed Journals limiter as needed.
• Use phrase searching, when appropriate, by placing quotes around a group of words you want to keep in a specific order, such as book or film titles.

For Books: 

• For non-fiction (Literary criticism, guides and manuals, biographies, histories, case studies, essays, philosophy etc.)

  • Search for feminis* AND nonfiction (combine nonfiction with any type of literary criticism, theory or movement)
  • Limit to Print Books or Ebooks. 

• For fiction (fairy tales, folk tales, novels, stories, etc.)

  • Search for feminis* AND fiction (combine fiction with any type of literary criticism, theory or movement)
  • Limit to Print Books or Ebooks.  

Subject Headings are words and phrases assigned to books, articles, and other resources. These terms help organize the information. 

These headings appear as a list of terms and phrases beneath the title info on your search results page:

An efficient way to search for resources is to search for items tagged with specific subject headings.  Navigate to the Advanced Search option (below the search boxes on the results page) and choose Subject Headings from the gray drop-down menu. 

For the social sciences, try searching headings like:

• "Social sciences"
• socio*
• sociology, or 
• those terms paired with a social science of interest.

Who is that author, and why are they important? What is 'New Historicist Criticism' again?  A reference database like Gale Virtual Reference Library is an excellent place to refresh your memory on a wide variety of topics across subject areas!

If you have problems logging into library databases, see: