English Language & Literature Databases
Recommended starting places
Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost)
(article index)
A large academic multi-disciplinary database providing indexing for over 8,000 journals and full text for nearly 4,700 (including more than 3,600 peer-reviewed journals). PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for some journals.
Literary Research Guide
The Literary Research Guide is a selective, annotated guide to reference sources essential to the study of British literature, literatures of the United States, other literatures in English, and related topics.
Literature Resource Center (Gale)
(reference resource)
A complete literature reference database featuring biographical, bibliographical, and critical content.
MLA International Bibliography (EBSCOhost)
(article index)
1927-present. Indexes journals, books, and other materials in the fields of language, literature, linguistics, and folklore.
Oxford English Dictionary
(reference resource, dictionary)
The OED is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words from across the English-speaking world.
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ARTFL Project
(article index)
A full-text database of classical French writings, including literary works, political tracts, philosophical writings, and technical treatises.
Contemporary Authors (Gale)
(reference resource, biography)
Biographical information and bibliographical references for writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields.
Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale)
(reference resource)
A collection of critical essays on contemporary authors. Each entry contains a biographical/critical introduction, listing of principal works and sources for further study.
Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale)
(reference resource)
Provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.
English Short Title Catalogue
(reference resource)
The ESTC provides extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language—as well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world published between 1473 and 1800.
H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(reference resource)
H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences is an online scholarly service which is especially useful for substantial reviews of recently published books.
Humanities International Complete - content now available in Humanities Source
Humanities Source
(article index, e-books)
Providing full text for thousands of journals, books and other published sources from around the world, this authoritative resource offers an invaluable collection for students, researchers and educators interested in all aspects of the humanities, with worldwide content pertaining to literary, scholarly and creative thought. As the most comprehensive resource available in its field, Humanities Source provides full text—plus abstracts and bibliographic indexing—for the most noted scholarly sources in the humanities, including feature articles, interviews, obituaries, bibliographies, original works of fiction, drama and poetry, book reviews, and reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, operas, plays, radio and television programs, and much more.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(article index)
Covers literature pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700). Citations for journal articles, reviews, review articles, monographs, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies are included. The full runs of 730 scholarly journal titles, published since 1842, have been indexed.
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
A comprehensive historical survey of the most important figures, schools, and movements in the field of literary theory.
Labyrinth
(article index, e-books and digital collections)
The Labyrinth provides organized access to electronic resources in medieval studies.
Latino Literature (Alexander Street Press)
(reference resource, e-books and digital collections)
Contains approximately 380 plays and 67,500 pages of prose and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (ProQuest)
(article index)
1973-present. Covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, as well as various fields of linguistics.
NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship)
(article index)
NINES is a federated online publishing tool which aggregates a number of important 19th-century scholarly journals and archives including: the Victorian Studies Bibliography, British Women Romantic Poets, The William Blake Archive, and the Romantic Circles Praxis.
Project MUSE
(article index)
Over 200 full text journal titles covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. Project MUSE titles are included in the Full Text Journals search in The Source.
More choices may be found on the General Arts and Humanities page.
Subject Librarian
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