Research Guides: ENGL 398 : Senior Seminar (BMC): Background

Getting Started with Your Senior Essay

Reserve a library study carrel
Make a research appointment with a librarian
Book checkout: one semester, may be renewed for an additional semester
ZOTERO WORKSHOPS will be listed on the LITS Event Calendar or by appointment.

Tripod, EZ-Borrow & ILL

Finding Books

Tripod Library Catalog
- Use Tripod to find resources available from the TriCo Libraries.
- Search for books, e-books, videos, articles, digital media, and more
WorldCat
Use WORLDCAT to identify books not held by the TriCo. Borrow the books through EZ-Borrow. If not available in EZ-Borrow, try Interlibrary Loan.
Google Books
Google Books full-text indexing may reveal scholarship that you might have otherwise missed!

EZ-Borrow & Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

Borrowing Beyond the TriCo
Request books and articles that are not available in Tripod through E-ZBorrow or Interlibrary Loan.

MLAIB & Scholarly Articles

Start Here - MLAIB

MLA International Bibliography
Covers 1926-present. THE scholarly database for literature and languages.

Use to determine how to access the full text of the article or book chapter.

More Databases

Google Scholar
Enables you to search Google specifically for scholarly literature.
ProQuest (all databases)
For multi-disciplinary topics, try a "super search" accross all the ProQuest datatbases.

Background

General Background Information

Literature Resource Center
Provides biographies, bibliographies and scholarly articles on novelists, poets, essayists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of highly-studied authors.
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Detailed profiles of novelists, playwrights, and other writers, and includes excerpts of published criticism of their works. Covers authors who are alive, or who died after 12/31/1959.

Biographical Sources

Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online (DLB)
Provides the full text of thousands of biographical and critical essays on important literary figures from all eras, genres, and geographic areas. Many essays include manuscript pages, portraits, excerpts of criticism, bibliographies, and more. Browse by author or by volume, or search the full text. Publication of DLB began in 1978 and is ongoing.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Contains biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond,from the earliest times to the year 2001. Articles focus on noteworthy people from all walks of life. No living person is included. Coverage varies.
Gale Biography in Context
Provides access to biographical sources on over 325,000 people from throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. Includes full-text articles from hundreds of periodicals.

Companions and Bibliographies

Cambridge Companions Online
Offers subject or theme based collections of companion e-books within a richly functional, fully cross-searchable online environment. Areas covered include literature, classics, philosophy, religion, culture and music.
Cambridge Histories Online
Searchable collection of e-books; useful starting point for exploring topics in history
Very Short Introductions
Launched by Oxford University Press in 1995, Very Short Introductions offer concise introductions to a diverse range of subject areas from Climate to Consciousness, Game Theory to Ancient Warfare, Privacy to Islamic History, Economics to Literary Theory.

Book Reviews

For even more information on finding book reviews, see the Book Review guide.

London Review of Books
1979 to date.
Periodicals Index Online
17th century to 1990s.
Readers' Guide Retrospective
1890-1982
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement
1902 to date.

Selected Primary Sources

African American Newspapers: the 19th century
Contains full-text articles about the cultural life and history during the 1800s, including presidential and congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. Also contains large numbers of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience. Covers 1827-1902 (with gaps).
African American Periodicals 1825-1995
Search through 170 periodicals by and about African Americans, including academic and political journals, magazines, newsletters, literary journals, annual reports of organizations, and other genres. Includes publications from 25 states and Washington, DC.

This collection is based upon James P. Danky's African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998).
America's Historical Newspapers
Search through 2,000+ historical newspapers published in the United States between 1690-1922. Includes publications from all 50 states, large cities and small towns, and a mix of major newspapers and titles with smaller circulations.
American Periodicals Series Online
Search through 1,800 magazines and journals published in the United States between 1740-1940. Includes early scientific publications, trade journals, popular magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, and journals such as Puck, The Dial, and McClure's.
Archives of Sexuality & Gender
Archives of Sexuality & Gender: Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, has more than five thousand rare and unique books covering sex, sexuality, and gender issues across the sciences and throughout history.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 including books, pamphlets, almanacs, Bibles and treatises. Subjects covered include history, geography, fine arts, medicine, science, literature, language, religion, philosophy and law. Significant collections of women writers, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare are also included.
Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003
Provides full-text access to the entire run of the Illustrated London News, the world's first fully illustrated weekly newspaper. Contains high-quality color images of all pages, and all text is fully searchable. Offers insight into all areas of culture and world history for the period covered. Covers 1842-2003.
New York Times
Full-text access to news articles, blog posts, videos, images, and multimedia features. Coverage from 1851-present.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Full text versions of books, magazines, and other materials published in the 19th century. This is a collection in development. Materials now in the database cover Asia and the West, British politics and society, high and popular culture in Britain, and European literature.
The Times Digital Archive
Provides full-text and full-image articles from The Times of London for the years 1785-2019.

Theory Help

Theory

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Articles on critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, specific countries and historical periods.
New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Comprehensive reference for those interested in the history of poetry or in any aspect of the technique or criticism of poetry
Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory
Annotated bibliographies in 3 areas: Concepts, Genres and Approaches; Literary Critics and Theorists and Major Schools of Criticism.
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Definitions of terms from the fields of literary theory and criticism, rhetoric, versification and drama.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
Gives a comprehensive coverage of every aspect of literary theory, both traditional and contemporary. Features around 175 essays written by a wide range of experts and distinguished scholars to explore the problems, the concepts, and the methodologies that arise when we discuss literary texts.

Film & Media Topics

Film Topics: Specialized Databases

Screen Studies Collection
ProQuest Performing Arts Database‎
Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies
Short encyclopedic entries and annotated bibliographies of the most important books, articles, and Web sites in cinema and media studies.

Citing and Citation Managers

MLA Handbook

MLA Handbook (9th ed.)

Citation Examples in MLA Style

Zotero

zotero icon

Zotero is a free citation management tool that helps you:

Save all your citations in a single place
Organize your references into collections for different subjects, projects, or courses with tags or folders
Store PDFs, notes, images, web pages, and other files with your citations.
- BMC users: unlimited free storage if you use a brynmawr.edu address
- Swarthmore users: unlimited free storage if you use a swarthmore.edu address
Create bibliographies instantly in any standard citation style
Cite sources quickly while writing
Share references and bibliographies with colleagues, students, or professors

Zotero Workshops

Upcoming Zotero Workshops are listed on the LITS Events Calendar.