Reference

Criticism & Biographical Information:  

Literary Criticism (brown books)                                R 809.04 
Dictionary of Literary Biography (blue books)              R 810.9 – R820.9 
Literature Resource Center (online database of brown and blue books!) 

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Online Catalog

Some tips: 

• Keyword:  most flexible, most results, relevance is questionable. 
• Subject:  more restrictive, categories, works like an index, idea farm.  
• Title:  more restrictive, have precise titles, works like an index.   
• If searching for criticism on an author, search in the keyword category and include the words criticism and interpretation.  Ex:  Thoreau criticism interpretation 

Magic words:  

ecocriticism
ecology in literature 
environmental literature 
natural history 
nature conservation 
nature in literature 
nature writing 

Online Databases

MLA
Partially full text database that contains citations to articles in over 4,400 journal titles. 

• Use connectors:  and, or, not 
• Use truncation:  * on the end of your term retrieves variant endings.  Example:  lit* retrieves literature, literary, but also litter! 
• Use wildcards:  ? can substitute for one or more letters, and accounts for spelling variations.  Example:  theat?? retrieves theater and theatre; wom?n retrieves woman and women. 
• Use the indexes to find the names of authors and journals, and names as subjects to find information about authors. 

JSTOR  
A largely full-text, social sciences database that covers complete runs of scholarly periodicals, but NOT the most current 2-5 years! 

• Use the Advanced Search. 
• Select whichever disciplines/journals are relevant to your searching, noting that you decide whether or not JSTOR includes citations and links to other content. 
• Use the drop-down menu for options to connect search terms:  and, or, near. 
• Use “?” on the end of your term to account for plurals, and “*” to account for variant word endings. 
• Use quotes to search phrases. Ex.:  “nature writing” AND “United States” 

Project MUSE 
Full text of nearly 200 scholarly journals published by university presses in the humanities and social sciences. 

• Use quotations (e.g. "nature writing") to search for phrases. 
• If desired, combine terms by typing Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, or type terms in separate boxes and use the pull-downs at the left of the search boxes.  
• Select fields to search from the right-hand pulldowns.   
• Use truncation (*) on the end of your term to search for plurals or parts of words. 
• If needed, use limits to narrow the search results to specific sets of journals or articles. 

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Websites 

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
          http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/  

 The Walden Woods Project 
          http://walden.org  

The Thoreau Reader 
          http://thoreau.eserver.org/default.html  

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment: Ecocritical Library 
          http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/  

Oxford English Dictionary  
          http://www.oed.com/ 

Hendrix College Archives
          http://www.hendrix.edu/baileylibrary/baileylibrary.aspx?id=1673 

Journals, UCA, & Interlibrary Loan

Check our Journals List to see what journals Bailey Library has.  If we don’t have the journal you need, please check UCA’s catalog, BearCat.  If they don’t have what you need, you can always order your article through interlibrary loan.  See a librarian for more information. 

Documentation

For help in citing electronic resources, see our online guides. 

Last Modified on 8/31/2011