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ENGL 4107--American Novel I
Instructor: Dr. Scott Davis (scdavis@athena.csustan.edu)

Library Catalog

• The CSU Stanislaus Library online catalog--use to find books that we own.
• Select All Library Materials (Books, etc.)
• To find literary criticism on a novel, play or short story in the Library Catalog, do a subject search on the author’s name (last name first—e.g., chopin, kate).
• Choose either the general heading for the author, the subheading “Criticism and Interpretation,” or the subheading with the title of your particular work, and use the call numbers to locate the books in the stacks.
• The available books on your topic should generally be grouped in the same area.

Gale Literary Criticism Series

• Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism	Authors of all genres who died between 1900 and 1999	Ref / PN771 .G27
  Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism	Authors of all genres who died between 1800 and 1899	Ref / PN761 .N5
  Short Story Criticism	Short story writers of all eras	Ref / PN3373 .S386
  Dictionary of Literary Biography	Biographies and literary criticism of writers from all eras and genres	Ref / PN451 .D52x

MLA Bibliography

• Start with a “Words anywhere” search (the default mode).
• Click the “Set other limits” button below the search box. Choose your desired language(s), choose “Journal Articles,” and "Book Article" under Publication Type, and click the “Set Limits" button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
• To find criticism on a specific work, enter the author’s last name and the title of the work separated by the word “and.” For example, to find criticism on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, enter the search phrase hawthorne and scarlet letter.
• Click the grey button marked Check for Holdings to see if our library subscribes to that journal.
• Click the button marked SFX to see if the article is available full-text in another database.

Academic Search Elite

• Try a search on the author's name (e.g., ralph ellison). Click on the author's name under Narrow Results by Subject, and then look for a link to Criticism
• You can also try a keyword search like the one described above for the MLA database.
• Entries that say "Full Text" include the entire article online. Click on the "Full Text" link to display the complete article.
• Entries that say "Find It!" may be available elsewhere. Click on the "Find It!" link to look display the Find It! menu:

• A link that says "Full text available online via" should display the entire article online.
• A link that says "We may own this, check the Library Catalog" means the library probably subscribes to that source in print. You can find print journals in the periodicals area shelved alphabetically by the name of the magazine or journal.
• A link that says "Interlibrary Loan" means the library does not subscribe to that source. You can submit an interlibrary loan request for these items.

JSTOR and Project MUSE

• These are full-text databases containing articles from a number of scholarly journals in a variety of disciplines. The SFX link from the MLA database will lead you to JSTOR and MUSE, but you can also try searching them separately. They have great content, but their search features are limited.

For some guidelines on how to evaluate information from the web, see Evaluating Web Resources (from Sonoma State University)
 

Voice of the Shuttle

American Studies Web

Heath Anthology of American Literature

Norton Anthology of American Literature

PAL (Perspectives in American Literature)

CSU Stanislaus Department of English

Literary Resources (Jack Lynch)
 

If you have any problems accessing the resources listed on this page or any other library-related questions, please contact Arthur Buell at abuell@csustan.edu or at (209) 664-6557.

Prepared by Arthur Buell abuell@csustan.edu

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This document is maintained by: the CSUS Library(wwwlibrary@wwwlibrary.csustan.edu)
Page updated: 08/16/2008