Literary Reference Collections
The following are not single electronic reference works, but collections of literary reference works presented online. Instead of needing to know the name of a particular reference work, these products permit researchers to search across multiple works at one time. These are good for literary biography and literary criticism. Also included are the full text of many literary journal articles.
All of these resources can be accessed from off-campus, but you will need to enter your Multipass username and password 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.
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.
An updated and enhanced version of LION. 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.
Gumberg Library subscribes to a number of collections of electronic reference works. These cover all subject areas, and in most cases, you are able to search all the titles in a collection at once. This means you do not have to have in mind a particular book to search.
Individual Electronic Reference Works
American Literature
Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
British Literature
Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature
Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000
Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th Edition
Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology
Children's Literature
Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults
Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature
St. James Guide to Children's Writers
General
Dictionary of Literary symbols
OED: Oxford English Dictionary
Themes
Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature
Women Writers
Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion
History of Feminist Literary Criticism
World Literatures
Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature
Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
Man Reading. Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) is the standard resource for very detailed biographical articles on writers of all types, in many genres. Each volume is devoted to authors from a particular time, country, or genre. There are well over 200 volumes to the set. The Gumberg Library no longer owns the print version of this valuable reference work, but we can access its contents online through the Literature Resource Center.
Do a search for an author's name in the Literature Resource Center, then go to the "Content Types" menu on the upper right of the screen. Click on "Biographies." DLB content will be found in the resulting list.
