American Literature

Getting Started
Journal Articles
Web Sites

Getting Started

If you are not sure what your topic is about, try one or more of the following:

Encyclopaedias:

Benet's reader's encyclopedia of American literature

Handbooks:

Cambridge history of American literature

Bibliography of American literature : a selective index

The Oxford companion to women's writing in the United States

The Oxford companion to American literature

Contemporary authors

Dictionaries:

Dictionary of literary biography

Journal Articles

For recent information, journal articles are often the best sources. Looking through individual journals in the hope of finding relevant material is time-consuming. It is better to use the databases to find articles on your topic.

Journal Articles:

Key databases

MLA international bibliography

Indexes materials on modern language, literature, linguistics, and folklore

Literature online (LION)

Literature Online is a fully searchable library of over 300,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose plus biographies, bibliographies and key secondary sources

Early American fiction 1789-1895

This is a collection of full texts of the first editions of American novels and short stories written before 1875

Early American imprints. Series 1, Evans (1639-1800)

Covering American history and literature through the colonial period up to the eighteenth century

Early American imprints. Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)

Provides full-text access to the 36,000 American imprints published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century