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English Resources: Home
This guide provides a general orientation to library resources related to English at Appalachian State University.
This guide will help you find resources related to English language and literature at Appalachian State University. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly (my contact information is to the right) or schedule an appointment with me.
Getting Started
The following databases are excellent places to start research about English language and literature.
This is the premier database for research related to literature.
MLA covers folklore, languages, linguistics, and literature. Provides over one million citations for items from more than 4,400 journals and series published worldwide. Indexes books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, bibliographies, and websites.
Gale's database provides a collection of several literature-related databases.
LRC is built upon Gale's three author resources: Contemporary Authors, offering biographical coverage of more than 120,000 modern writers; Contemporary Literary Criticism, featuring entries on all authors appearing in CLC since Vol. 95 of the print series and select profiles of authors prior to Vol. 95; and Dictionary of Literary Biography, containing more than 10,000 biocritical essays on authors and their works.
Provides biographical, bibliographical, and critical content on literary figures from all time periods writing in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, journalism, and more.
This database provides a large number of comprehensive literary biographies.
Featuring comprehensive literary biographies, you'll find profiles of more than 143,000 past and present authors, historians, journalists, screenwriters, publishers, and playwrights.
Focusing on a particular literary period, movement or genre, each volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series concentrates on major literary figures with in-depth essays and related images such as manuscript pages and revised galley proofs, title pages, dust jackets and pictures from the authors' lives.
This is the authoritative historical dictionary of English.
The OED traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean.
"The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary of English, covering the language from the earliest times to the present day. It aims to show not only the current meanings of words, but also to trace their development through time. Entries contain detailed etymological analysis, and are illustrated by quotations from a wide range of English language sources from around the world, making the OED a unique historical record."
This database includes a wide variety of literary criticism.
Provides access to scholarly and popular commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, encyclopedias, books and periodicals. Includes cross searching with Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online and Something About the Author Online.
Literature Criticism Online represent a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. Comprehensive coverage of much-studied topics like Modernism, Romanticism, Gay and Lesbian Literature, the Holocaust, Magic Realism and hundreds more.
