Literary Criticism

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After determining whether there are any books on your author, you'll want next to search the databases for articles that have appeared in the journals and magazines, as well as for essays that were originally published in books and reference works.   Some of our databases are multi-disciplinary, while others cover a particular field or subject.

Once again, it is important to remember that these articles and essays, even though they are available electronically, are not considered Internet sources!  The journals and books in which they appear were originally issued (usually) in print form; we purchase, at great expense, electronic access as a convenience to our users.  So these are not "freebies" up on the Internet, and consequently they are not searchable in Google or Yahoo!

Just as was the case with our book materials, some authors--and some literary works--have been written about far more than others.  Some of the works on your list--The Kite Runner, Ties That Bind, and Battle Royale, for example, have been written about hardly at all.  But as part of your research process, you will want to check the databases to determine whether they might contain any relevant material.

Let's look first at the databases devoted specifically to literary topics.  We now subscribe to a number of these, as listed below.  Be sure to note the coverage of each database before conducting your search.  You'll probably want to start with the Literature Resource Center.   Once again, remember that you are looking specifically for essays and articles that deal with the cultural and historical setting of your literary work.  These databases are easy to search, and so should require no special instructions.

             Literature Databases

Multi-Discipline Databases

Beyond the specialized databases above, you'll want to check the large multi-discipline databases as well.  In these we suggest that you do a Keyword search in which you enter your author's last name, the AND operator, and the Title (or a phrase from the title) of your literary work in quotation marks.  Typical search statements would be formulated like this:

      flaubert and "madame bovary"

     achebe and "things fall apart"

     paton and "beloved country"   [full title is Cry, the Beloved Country]

     wiesel and night   [quotation marks not needed because title is single word]

Let's say that your literary work is Gustave Flaubert's famous nineteenth-century novel, Madame Bovary.  Your search screen in one of the most useful of our general databases, Academic Search Premier, would look like this:

Note that we have checked the box for Full Text.  Unfortunately, some of the articles will include just a summary of the article (called an abstract) and not the full article itself; we can eliminate these if we designate "Full Text."

Note: if you're not being very successful in finding sources, you might uncheck the "Full Text" box and see if you turn up something that looks more promising.  If so, send me an email at nhoyle@tctc.edu and I'll try to get the full text of the article for you by other means.

Here are the results of our Madame Bovary search, which returns for us 44 articles with full text.  Note that the source journals are divided into two categories: Academic Journals and Magazines.  In general for projects like this we prefer articles from the scholarly journals, as they are likely have more depth and be more authoritative than articles that appear in the popular magazines.  So at the outset you might take the Academic Journals option; then, if you don't get satisfactory results, see what you can turn up in the Magazines.

Selecting the Academic Journals option, we get a subset of 27 articles, as indicated here:

You want to go through the articles, one by one, trying to make some evaluations about the potential usefulness of each.  Sometimes the title will be informative, sometimes not.  If not, you'll probably want to click on the title and read the abstract (or article summary) that will usually be provided.  In any case, you will always want to be alert to clues--and to build upon the knowledge of your topic that you have already developed.

Consider the very first article, "The Politics of Publishing During the Second Empire: The Trial of Madame Bovary Revisited."  If you had looked at any of the Author Surveys, as recommended back in Step 1, you surely would know about the famous trial in which Flaubert was charged with writing a work that was pornographic and blasphemous.  What you would hope for in an article like this is an analysis of the reasons why the novel became so notorious and what that says about the society--and its values--that Flaubert so vividly portrays in the novel.

The article seems promising, so let's click on the title and bring up the abstract page, which provides, in addition to the summary of the article, complete publishing information about the article.  This is information that you will need when you prepare your Works Cited page.  Also here you will find links to additional subject terms (like censorship) that might help you expand your research.  

You should now know whether you want to read the actual article.  If so, you can click on the Full Text link and it will be brought up in all of its glory.

At Last, Time to Search

With this rather extensive background, you should now be able to do effective searches in the two large-scale databases below:

What's Next?

Tthis completes our coverage of the literature sources.  So let's move on and give some consideration to the Country sources.

Proceed to Step 6

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