Preliminary Searching : A Few Good Articles

Once you have pretty much chosen your topic -- know the author and have narrowed the work down to two or three possibilities -- there are a number of ways to find basic introductory bibliography, including

A. Definitive Text

B. Definitive biographies and biographical materials (ie. Letters)

C. Bibliographies of Secondary Sources

a. Annotated bibliographies, as books or articles
b. Lists of important critical works with evaluations as to which are most important, canonical, widely read and accepted.

1. Norton (or other big, reputable) anthology, as recent as possible

2. Casebooks

• a) a selection of good articles
• b) discussion of the critical reputation of the author or work, and/or
• c) additional bibliographic lists of sources.

• Norton Critical Editions provide: definitive texts, source materials, contemporary reviews, authoritative selections of critical articles, and suggestions for further reading. {Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte}

 
• Twayne Books provide: chronology, first chapter biographical overview, inner chapters on basic interpretations of major works, last chapter overview of critical reputation, aswell as selected and annotated critical bibliography. {Rita Mae Brown by Carol Ward (1993)}

 
• Twayne MasterWorks focus on a single work. They usually contain a section on historical context including material on the influence and reception of the work, followed by an intensive reading, and ending with an annotated selective bibliography. { Ellen Rosenman. A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity.(1995)

 
•  MLA Approaches to Teaching series. These books are relatively recent and can be very useful. They usually begin with a Materials sections containing essays that discuss texts and critical articles.{MLA Approaches to Teaching: Approaches to Teaching Byron, ed. Fred Shilstone | excerpt from Materials Section of Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, ed. Jewel Brooker (1988)}

 
•  Twentieth Century Views is a rather dated series of collections of classic critical essays. The Introduction usually provides a convenient summary of all the essays in the book, and a chronology and selective bibliographies are available at the end. { The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Ian Gregor. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970} .

 
• New Century Views is a series recently launched to update Twentieth Century Views having the same format but more recent articles and abibliographies.

 
• Other casebooks/collections of Critical Essays are published by G.K. Hallin Boston.

 
• Harold Bloomhas been editing a wide-ranging series of selected essays on various authors for Chelsea House.

 
• Cambridge University Press has begun publishing a series of Cambridge Companionsto various canonical authors.

1. Expanded Academic Index

Use to find the most recent articles on your author and/or work. Look under author's last name or name and key word from title of the work (woolf and dalloway). Usually only provides one or two to a dozen references, depending on the specificity of your topic.  Compare footnotes on these most recent articles, and use them to triangulate which older articles and books are still being regularly cited. Expanded Academic indexes only the top journals in the field, so leaves out many sources covered by MLA.  For book reveiws and other articles in newspapers and non-acadeic magazines, use Info-tracts and Lexus/Nexis.

2. Card Catalog/ LUIS

Look up Author as subject (s=Dickinson, E) and find:
• a. If we have bibliographies on the author
• (Primary (descriptive) bibliographies will describe all the editions of works published by that author.
• Sample Pages from the Primary, Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of T.S. Eliot by Donald Gallup

 
• Secondary biblioswill list critical articles and books. If we have an annotated secondary biblio on your author, it may contain an Introduction that provides an outline of criticism on her/him, as well as annotated entries on all the articles and book chapters on particular works published before the biblio was written. These are gold mines, but usually need to be supplemented with more recent scholarship.
• Sample Entries from Annotated Bibliography on T.S. Eliot by Helen Martin

 
Also try k=author's last name and reference to see if there are specific reference works about your author.
 
• Sample Page from Duchac's The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary

 
• b. What are the most recent books, with the most intriguing titles, from the best university presses (Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Minnesota, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Indiana University, Columbia, etc.). Check through to see which of these have biblios and/or indexes; these can give you valuable leads to other books and articles.

 
• c. What is the general range of call-numbers on your author (Be sure also to note books which are not shelved in the same place; you need to make special note of these because you can't find them by shelf-reading.)

3. Shelf-Reading

You can do much of the work on LUIS by just sitting down on the floor and pulling books about your author off the shelves. Check Tables of Contents to see what all the book covers. Then check the index in the back to see how many pages are devoted to your work. If material on your work is concentrated in one or two places, you can also look up footnotes for those pages to see who all gets cited. Also look for Bibliography at the end of the book. Reshelve books you don't want to check out; put them in their correct locations for other library patron's convenience.

Remember, shelf reading will not find:

a. Particularly good books that have been checked out, or
b. Useful studies that are only parts of books and are shelved elsewhere.
4. Gale Research Series
Gale Research Press has published a number of reference works that can be very helpful.
• DLB's (Dictionaries of Literary Biography)  Look through the titles searching for categories that might include your author (Twentieth-Century American Science Fiction Writers, American Women Poets, etc.). You can also do this by shelf-reading: all the DLB's are in one place: REF PN451 D52.

 
• Contemporary Literary Criticism is another series published by Gale which contains excerpts from critical articles about 2,000 authors who are now living or who died after 1959. Gale also published similar collections for other time periods and areas. There are also series covering Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.
• List of Gale Reference Series

 
Look up your author's last name in the cumulative index of the latest volume of CLC ot TCLC or NCLC; that will direct you to all the entries on your author in previous volumes, as well as to entries in other series published by Gale Research Press such as Contemporary Authors , DLB's, and Contemporary Author's Autobiography Series.
• Index to Contemporary Literary Criticism


5. Amazon.com
I often use amazon.com as a tool for finding the latest books on particular topics and authors; sometimes these books are not yet in our library because our process of identifying and buying books takes a long time.  (If a book is not in our library, you can always order in on Inter-library loan.  And sometimes you can talk the librarians into buying it -- but it won’t come in time to help research this semester.)  Recently – as they have begun to store full indexes and excerpts for new books, amazon has begun a new keyword service where a search for some topics or authors turns up all the books that contain any references at all.  This could revolutionize scholarly research…. So continue to watch developments on-line.
 

Available on-line as an electronic data base, under “Literature.”  Use to find widest possible listing of academic articles and books from professional journals and university presses.  Does list separate essays collected in anthologies, but does not list chapters or sections in books.  This is the mother lode for finding all articles for English papers; trouble is, it doesn’t tell you which articles are the best, the ones all the other critics are reading and using. If you find certain articles are reprinted in anthologies several times, that is a good clue they are important.

2. Specialized Area Bibliographies

• k=research review and criticism will give you a list of specialized ibliographies published by MLA. Go through the titles to see if the genre and period of your work is covered by any of these.  These books usually contain bibliographic essays which outline the history of scholarship on various works, themes, and figures.  The English romantic poets : a review of research and criticism / John Clubbe ... <et al.> ; edited by Frank Jordan. 1985.

3.Reference Guides

Another way to find out if there are specialized period bibliographies for your work is to look in one of the reference guides for English Studies. Two of the more recent are:

• Harner, James L. Literary Research Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources for the Study of Literature in English and Related Topics. NY: MLA, 1993. Ready Ref PR 83 H37 1993

 

 

( I find this so obsessively detailed it is hard to use. To get to what you want to find, look in sections M-R on national literatures. Each of these sections is preceded by grey pages which outline everything covered. You are looking for "Guides to Scholarship and Criticism.")

• Sample Page from Harner Showing Annotations for MLA Bibliographies on Romantic and Victorian Poetry

 
• Marcuse, Michael J. A Reference Guide for English Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. REF PR56 M37 1990.

This seems easier to use than Harner; for one thing pages are bigger. Just look in sections M-S (English and American Literature) for your period. Then look for "Biobibliographies and Reviews of Research." Especially helpful is the guide to research on "Individual Authors" at the end of each section (only covers "major" authors).
• Sample Page of References on Stephen Crane from Marcuse

 

4 . Completing the Scholarly Circle: Following Footnotes

Read footnotes for pages on the particular work you are researching to find which authors are being cited. One of the quickest ways to find the scoop on a literary work is to find the most recent article or book published on it, read their footnotes, and find all the articles and books they cite. You will quickly learn to appreciate the generosity of scholars who write long footnotes explaining which other works are best to read on a given subject.{ Footnotes from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. War of the Words. Vol. I of No Man's Land: The Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988) }

Eventually, you can get to the point that you 've read everything that anybody cites in any article on your topic. That means you 've completed your research -- at least until the next article comes out.

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