English 102 Process Guide

Step 4

Searching the Library Catalog

for Literary Criticism in Books

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Overview of a Catalog Search

Before we do an actual search in the library catalog, let's get a brief overview of how to do our searches and what to look for in our results.  Once again, you want to be realistic in your expectations.  Not all authors on your list have had books written about them, while others have been written about extensively.  So you may hit a "dry hole" or you might hit a gusher.  That, as they say, is life.

The best way to find books containing analyses and interpretations of your literary work is to do a subject search in the library catalog on your author.  Once you get into the catalog, you will be presented with a search box that allows you to select, from a drop-down menu, the type of search you want to perform, e.g. Keyword, Author, Title, or Subject.  Let's say that you're interested in critical studies of Jamaica Kincaid's novel Annie John.  So in the search box you would enter your author's name (in any order) and select the subject option from the drop-down menu. This is what your search screen would look like:

Note that when you do a search in the catalog you are likely to return regular printed books as well as electronic books (ebooks).  The advantage of the ebooks is that they can be read online in their entirety, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. It is important to realize that our ebooks, even though they are in electronic form, are not considered Internet sources.  They are simply regularly published books that we purchase, at great expense, in electronic form.  You will not find any of them using a search engine like Google or Yahoo!  To use the ebooks off campus, you will need a username and password.  If you have not already done so, you might want to Create a Free Account now.

Unfortunately for those in the online courses or courses taught off campus, our ebook collection of literary crticism is not quite as strong as our print collection.  So, depending on your results, you may find it necessary to make a trip to the Pendleton campus to check out a book that looks especially promising.

Let's now look at the results of our Jamaica Kincaid search:

Our search turns up six titles, divided evenly between print books and ebooks.  Rather unusually, for items #3 and #5, we have both a print and an electronic version of the same book; the text in the two items will be identical.

Sometimes you will not be able to determine from the brief descriptions given here whether a book contains a chapter or section devoted specifically to the literary work you are interested in.  In such cases, you might click on the Details button and see if there is fuller information under the Catalog Record tab.  Here is the Catalog Record for Item #3:

As you can see in the Contents Note, this book contains a chapter on Annie John.

Among the most useful kinds of sources we have are the anthologies of literary criticism that have been brought together in the various series edited by Harold Bloom, the world-renowned literary critic and professor of comparative literature at Yale University.  We have hundreds of these anthologies, in which Bloom brings together the very best studies that have been written by different critics.  You can count it as your lucky day when your search turns up one of these volumes.  So always keep an eye out for the name Harold Bloom.

Now consider these abbreviated results from a Subject search on the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

Note here that the last three items are anthologies of literary criticism edited by Harold Bloom.  Some of Bloom's critical anthologies will contain essays on multiple works (e.g. #2), while the essays in others (items # 3 and #4) will all pertain to a single literary work.

Here is the catalog record for one of Bloom's critical anthologies on One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Note that each of the essays enumerated in the Contents Note is by a different literary critic and that each of the essays counts as a separate source.