The Gumberg Library provides access to three suites of electronic reference works geared to literature. Using both will provide your with a great amount of introductory information on your chosen literary topic.
Both of these collections of resources can be accessed off-campus, but you will have to enter your Multipass username and password word in order to use them.
Gale Literature Resource Center
This database provides information on thousands of authors and literary works. It includes biographies, reviews and news, literary criticism, and topic and work overviews.The contents of two massive reference sets, Contemporary Authors and Dictionary of Literary Biography, are included in this database.
Along with the full text of of 350,000 English and American works of literature, this database provides articles from 200 full-text literary journals and other key critical and reference resources. All Cambridge Companions to Literature are included in this database, as well as the critical book series, New Essays on the American Novel.
A robustly enhanced version of Literature Online. For literature scholars who need an exhaustive set of scholarly resources around a literary topic for research and course planning. 500,000 primary works and millions of records from journals, monographs, and dissertations are indexed in this database. Lots of full text.
For basic information about topics in all disciplines, including literature and history, these databases of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other sorts of reference works can be extremely useful
To use them off campus you will need to enter your Multipass information.
Composed by an anonymous poet between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf is the first great work of English literature. It looks back to the adventures of its exemplary hero in the Scandinavian/Germanic world from which its hearers' ancestors came. Traditionally included on high school and college reading lists, in recent times it has received new popularity due to the New York Times bestselling translation by the late Anglo-Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the 2006 film by Robert Zemeckis, with a script by Neil Gaiman.
This guide is designed to point Gumberg Library users to the wealth of information sources available at and through the Gumberg Library on this foundational work of English literature.
Use the tabs that run across the top of the page to see the different sorts of resources available.
If at any time in your research your need help, Ask Gumberg. Or you can contact me, Ted Bergfelt, the creator of this page. Click to Send Email, or phone me at 412.396.5351.
The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature by 
A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature by 
