Junior Paper Research (Literary Criticism)

Junior Paper Research Spring 2008

Literary Criticism:

What is Literary Criticism? From Joyce Valenza at Springfield Township High School

Why is literary criticism worth studying? Read this article by Steven Hale, Georgia Perimeter College.

Books

Search the library catalog using the name of your author (last name, first name) as a SUBJECT.

For your junior paper you may checkout one book at a time for two weeks.

Reference Materials

PHS Library has many reference books that have collections of criticisms. To use these you will need to look up your author in the index or table of contents of each set. We have started a Junior Paper Reference Books wiki to make finding this material.

Databases

We have two subscription resources for literary criticism; Gale and Ebsco.

Gale databases allows you to do a powersearch across 4 databases at once. Narrow down your results by looking at the Subject headings or doing an Advanced Search with boolean logic.

The one database you cannot powersearch that will be especially helpful in your quest for literary criticism is Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. This is a terrific resource, if your author is included. The scope of this database as described by Gale is "the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, and other creative writers now living or who died after January 1, 2000.

Once logged into Thomson-Gale click on the title of the database at the bottom of the screen. Once you are into the database, search by your author's name or the title of the junior book.

EBSCO's Literary Reference Center is completely fulltext and includes literary criticism, interviews, reviews, biographies and reference books.

Public Library Databases

The public libraries have additional resources that are particularly useful for this assignment. To access these resources you will need a public library card. If you do not have one, please see Ms. Powell and she can assist you in accessing while on campus.

San Diego County Libraries (closest is the Poway branch, near the skate park)

Literature Resource Center

San Diego City Libraries (closest is Rancho Bernardo or Carmel Mountain)

Literature Resource Center

Internet Resources

netTrekker is an educational search engine that has evaluated internet sites of literary criticism.

You login with the username and password on the back of your ID card.

The following are some suggested web resources for literary criticism. Please feel free to let us know of any others you would recommend for this list.