Literary Criticism: 3. Find Literary Criticism

Find Literary Criticism

Choose a Topic

• Begin your assignment early enough to explore topics and research.
• You may want to examine multiple literary works to see how much information is available.
• Use databases to get Work Overviews.

Find Literary Criticism 

• For literature, our databases are MUCH more helpful than OneSearch.
• Don’t switch between evaluating and searching: it makes researching exhausting. Instead, when you find a source that MIGHT be good, email the full-text PDF and citation to yourself using the database tools. Then, on another day when you are fresh, go to your email and evaluate your sources.

We recommend starting in the database Literary Sources:

Other great literary databases include:

For Hamlet, Macbeth, Glass Menagerie, and House on Mango Street use:

Find Literary Criticism and Biographies 

• Biographies can help you find connections between an author's life and their literary works.
• This can pair well with the psychoanalytic and historical lenses.

Find Contemporary Sources

• Contemporary Sources were produced around the same time literary works were published.
• They can give you insight into if the work was successful and how it resonated with the general public of the time.