Library Guides: English Language and Literature: Background Information

Overview of English Language and Literature

English language and literature involves the study of Anglophone writing from the Middle Ages to today. It includes not only the British Isles, but also American literature and worldwide English literatures.

Best Bets

Annual bibliography of English language and literature ABELL. This link opens in a new window
Provides citations and indexing to articles, books, dissertations, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published worldwide since 1920 pertaining to bibliography and English language and literature. Usage info: Licensed for 4 simultaneous users.

Dictionary of Critical Theory
A wide-ranging and contemporary dictionary of critical theory available, covering the whole range of critical theory, including the Frankfurt school, cultural materialism, gender studies, literary theory, hermeneutics, historical materialism, and sociopolitical critical theory.

Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
A research environment enabling innovative research by integrating digital collectionswith rich full-text primary source content, dependable metadata, and intuitive subject indexing.
Johns Hopkins guide to literary theory & criticism This link opens in a new window
A full-text searchable database of articles on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. Contains digitized current and many back issues of academic journals, books, and primary sources.
MLA international bibliography (EBSCO platform) This link opens in a new window
Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Proved access to citations from worldwide publications, including periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
Oxford dictionary of national biography This link opens in a new window
The classic, authoritative biographical source for British history. Usage info: Licensed for 3 simultaneous users.
Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window
A complete text of the second edition of the Oxford English dictionary with quarterly updates, including revisions not available in any other form. Contains the complete text of the 20-volume second edition together with its 3-volume additions series.
Project Muse : scholarly journals online This link opens in a new window
Full-text articles from journals in history and the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Disciplines covered include literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. A brief bibliographic description of each title is given. Searches can be conducted across the full text of all journals in the database.

News, Popular Press, Other Periodicals

Popular press resources such as newspapers and magazines are expert but non-scholarly sources that report basic facts and offer opinions. One benefit of these sources is that they are printed shortly after an event, but they do not reach the level of analysis necessary for scholarly work.

Book Review Digest Plus This link opens in a new window
Book Review Digest Plus is an essential library tool that brings together book reviews on a wide range of topics, from a variety of sources. Unlike reviews on book-sale sites and the open Internet, many of the reviews are serious, academic works. This invaluable resource for literary and biographical research is essential for readers' advisory and collection development.
Chronicle of Higher Education This link opens in a new window
In addition to weekly issues and job listings, contains daily updates on a variety of topics of interest in higher education, which are not archived.

Los Angeles Review of Books
The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts.

New York review of books online This link opens in a new window
Contains extensive book reviews covering literature, culture, and current affairs.
Times Literary Supplement historical archive (TLS) This link opens in a new window
Provides searchable full-text access to the Times Literary Supplement from 1902. Includes more than 300,000 reviews, letters, poems and articles on writers, current theatre, cinema, music, and exhibitions.

Dictionaries & Encyclopedias

Dictionaries are most often collections of words in one or more specific languages, usually arranged in alphabetical order, providing information like word meanings, usage, etymology, and, when they contain more than one language, translations. Some dictionaries include information more commonly found in encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are collections of information on terms, figures, eras, locations also arranged alphabetically, and, alongside definitions of terms, they also include more in-depth general information on a topic. Encyclopedias can be general or subject-specific.

Dictionary of English manuscript terminology, 1450-2000
Dealing with the subject of documentation—which affects everyone's lives (from every-day letters, notes, and shopping lists to far-reaching legal instruments, if not autograph literary masterpieces)—Peter Beal defines, in a lively and accessible style, some 1,500 terms relating to manuscripts and their production and use in Britain from 1450 to the present day.

Dictionary of Old English This link opens in a new window
The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (600 - 1150 A.D.) of the English language, using today's most advanced technology. The DOE complements the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period 1100 - 1500 A.D.) and the Oxford English Dictionary (which documents the development of the English language to the present), the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English. Includes the first release of the letter H, containing some 2,956 headwords, as well as revised versions of the eight previously published fascicles (1986-2007).
Johns Hopkins guide to literary theory & criticism This link opens in a new window
A full-text searchable database of articles on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.
LEME : Lexicons of Early Modern English This link opens in a new window
"... a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods. Texts of word-entries whose headword (source) or explanation (target) language is English tell what speakers of English thought about their tongue in the period served by the Short-title and Wing catalogues, from the advent of printing to about 1700."--Introduction.
Literary encyclopedia This link opens in a new window
Provides profiles of the lives and works of important world authors whose works are available in English. Includes coverage of English, American, Canadian, German and Russian literatures with growing coverage of French, Italian, Japanese, Classical Greek, Latin, Hispanic and East European literatures.
Middle English compendium This link opens in a new window
Provides integrated access to three major Middle English electronic resources: the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources, including a large collection of Middle English texts.

New Oxford American dictionary (3 ed.)
With more than 350,000 words, phrases, and senses, and hundreds of explanatory notes, this dictionary provides the most comprehensive and accurate coverage of American English available.
New Oxford rhyming dictionary
It contains rhymes for over 45,000 words, including proper names, place names, and foreign terms used in English.

Oxford dictionaries online This link opens in a new window
"fully searchable content from Oxford's largest modern English dictionaries and thesauruses ... comprehensive coverage of British, US, and World English -- with audio pronunciations ... detailed writing, grammar, and spelling guidance"--About page.

Oxford dictionary of literary terms (3 ed.)
Includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this fully revised edition are recommended entry-level web links. Boasting over 1,200 entries, it is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language.

Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window
A complete text of the second edition of the Oxford English dictionary with quarterly updates, including revisions not available in any other form. Contains the complete text of the 20-volume second edition together with its 3-volume additions series.

Oxford guide to literary Britain & Ireland (3 ed.)
This classic reference work is a gazetteer of almost 2,000 places - villages, towns, cities, and landscapes - in Britain and Ireland detailing their connections with the lives of famous writers.
Oxford paperback thesaurus
300,000 synonyms and antonyms with thousands of usage examples from real English to show how synonyms are used in context.
Pocket Fowler's modern English usage (2 ed.)
A database of over two billion words of 21st century English, the new edition answers your most frequently asked questions about language use.
Visual English dictionary
The illustrations and cutaways from this Visual Dictionary provide extraordinary rich treatment of a wide range of topics from astronomy and the human body to the arts and society. All the computer-generated illustrations are produced to the highest quality and detail. The labelling on all diagrams reflects the very latest terms in use, for subjects as diverse as sport, architecture, computing, and weapons. The illustrations are a perfect way to explore topics, such as geography, science, and medicine that are typically difficult to explain in words.

Guides, Handbooks & Finding Aids

Reference resources like Handbooks, Guides, and Manuals provide subject-specific, sometimes technical information to aid in understanding important aspects of the discipline or subject that they treat. Finding Aids are useful for finding information within libraries, archives, or specific collections.

Middle English compendium This link opens in a new window
Provides integrated access to three major Middle English electronic resources: the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources, including a large collection of Middle English texts.
MLA Directory of Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Presents detailed information on more than 5,800 periodicals in the areas of literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. Includes editorial addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, frequency of publication, descriptions of the periodicals' scopes, circulation figures, subscription prices and addresses, advertising information, and submission guidelines.
Johns Hopkins guide to literary theory & criticism This link opens in a new window
A full-text searchable database of articles on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.

Biography

Biography provides a description of a person's life, detailing the basic facts like birth and death, education, family background, etc. but also portraying the individual subject's experience of those life events.

Biography and genealogy master index This link opens in a new window
Indexes hundreds of biographical sources covering individuals, living and dead, from every field of activity worldwide.
Literature resource center This link opens in a new window
Provides biographical, bibliographical, and critical content on literary figures from all time periods; draws on Gale Group's Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, and Dictionary of Literary Biography; selected full text from Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism; includes full text articles from numerous literary journals and periodicals.
Oxford dictionary of national biography This link opens in a new window
The classic, authoritative biographical source for British history. Usage info: Licensed for 3 simultaneous users.

English Language and Literature

English Literature and Digital Humanities Librarian