Guides: Literature in English: Resources: Overview

Guide to Literature in English Resources at Penn Libraries

This Guide seeks to facilitate the navigation of and access to Library resources and services for the study and teaching of Literatures in English. The panel on the left side includes a page dedicated to relevant Library services and various modes of accessing materials remotely and/or in person; it also breaks down resources, which include notable journal subscriptions, scholarly and archival databases, film archives, important reference tools, etc., by historical period and by mode of approach/area of interest.

For any questions or additional support, to schedule one-on-one research or instructional consultations, or to submit a purchase request, please contact the Library's subject specialist for Literatures in English, Theatre Arts, and Comparative Literature: Mayelin Perez (mayelinp@upenn.edu).

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Top Journals in Literature

Core Databases

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
Bibliographic citations with indexing for all aspects of English literature, literary culture, and linguistics. Holdings: 1920- Annual updates lag by one year.
Archives Unbound
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the college and university level.
Gale Literary Sources
Integrates Literature Resources from Gale and Literature Criticism Online into a single research environment. Offers term frequency and term cluster searches.
Gale Primary Sources
From Gale Primary Resources. Artemis provides an interface to cross search a growing number of primary resource databases. Searching for term frequency, and term clustering, visualizations, as well as enhanced metadata and character recognition are all features of this search interface.
Literature Online
LION is a searchable, full-text collection of over 250,000 works in English and American Literature.
MLA International Bibliography
Covers literature, languages, folklore, and linguistics. Includes English and foreign languages.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online offers an interlinked collection of authoritative Oxford editions of major works from the humanities. OSEO provides access to more than 240 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1700, including all of Shakespeare's plays, the poetry of John Donne, and works by John Milton and Jane Austen, among others.
Project Muse
Project Muse provides full text access to articles from over 300 scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences. Coverage begins in 1995 or more recently and in most cases continues to the present. Issues are available both as images and as text; searching is possible both within each title and across the whole database.

ProQuest One Literature
... contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works–-including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. It also contains interpretive sources such as book reviews and criticism sourced from wider, interdisciplinary publications in the fields such as humanities and history.

Core Encyclopedias and Reference Works

Cambridge Companions Online
Cambridge companions online offers subject or theme based access to cross-searchable ebook collections.

Critical Heritage Series
Each work in the series focuses on an individual author or literary work, compiling critical responses as published in newspapers, journals, magazines, and, occasionally, within correspondence.

Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB)
Provides biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres.
Global Books in Print
Literature Criticism Online
Literary reference work from Gale combining several literary commentary series, including Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Shakespearean Criticism, and others.
Literature Resource Center
Biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.

Lund Studies in English
A series of over 100 monographs and occasional edited volumes on the English language and on literature in English. Published by the English Studies unit at the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund.

Oxford Bibliographies Online
Bibliographic guides to a wide range of current scholarship, written and reviewed by academic experts, with original commentary and annotations.

Oxford Handbooks Online: Literature
Collections of essays on a wide range of topics related to literature.
Yearbook of English Studies
Intended to provide an additional outlet for articles dealing with the literature and language of English-speaking countries submitted to The Modern Language Review, including some of the more ambitious or more specialized papers. A substantial proportion of each volume consists of specially commissioned articles on a broad topic or theme.

Short Story Index
Detailed indexing for hundreds of thousands of short stories.

Oxford Very Short Introductions
Concise and accessible overviews on a wide range of topics (i.e. genres, aesthetic movements, critical theories, etc.) written by field experts.

Librarian

Mayelin Perez

she/her/hers

Email Me

Contact:

Van Pelt Library, 215

215-746-2735

Subjects: Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, English