Research Guides
Literary Research: Home
Literary Theory and Criticism
Literary Research Guide
When doing literary research, you are often employing literary criticism and theory and taking part in a written discourse with other scholars. This Literary Research Guide is meant to help you understand and find literary criticism and theory (secondary sources) as well as to seek out and identify scholarly conversations that you want to take part in.
For help finding works of literature (primary texts such as novels, short stories or poetry), use the Literature guide.
Starting Points
- Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new windowComprehensive database of poetry, drama and prose, literature journals, author biographies, topic overviews, and critical essays.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowThe most comprehensive source for scholarship in literature, language, linguistics, and folklore.
- ProQuest One Literature This link opens in a new windowProQuest One is for scholars who must engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research and course planning. It contains 5 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings.
UW Libraries Search
See the eBook FAQ for directions to limit your search to ebooks only.
- By Topic - Type in the keywords that broadly describe your topic. For example: asian american fiction anthology
- By Title - Type in the first few words of the book title in quotations. For example: "house on mango street"
- By Author - Type in the last name followed by the first name of the author in quotations. For example: "wheatley phillis"
Literature Guides
- American Literature
- British Literature
- Children's Literature
- Commonwealth Literatures
- Comparative Literature
- Drama
- English
- Folklore & Mythology
- French Studies
- German Studies
- Italian Studies
- North Korean Literature
- Portuguese Studies
- Scandinavian Studies
- Slavic Languages and Literatures
- Spanish Studies