Literary Criticism Overview   Tags: ahmad, demarco, literary_criticism, mccarthy  

In the Library CATALOG:  Use 'Advanced Search'. 

Enter the word 'Criticism' as a subject term.  on the next line of boxes, enter the author's name.

 - If you enter the Author's Name as "author" -- you will get books by the author (enter last, first). 

 - If you enter the Author's Name as a "subject" -- you will get books about the author  (enter last, first).  .

 - If you enter the Author's Name as a "keyword" -- you will get books about the author  and/or books that talk about his/her influences on other other authors, genres, and movements.

The databases tab on the Literature LibGuide will offer you alot to choose from, below are just a few suggestions for narrrowing down to critical sources.

Literature Criticism Online:

LCO offer overviews of critical approaches, use the browse topics tab and search for a term which describes the critical lens; for example, a search for 'femini' will bring up feminist and feminism topics.  Be flexible in your terms too, if you get no results with "freudian" try psychoanalysis, etc.

 For collections of critical scholarly journal articles based on an Author's works, consult Literature Criticism Online (Gale)  -- Click the browse by Author Tab.  Then choose the volume according to whether you want critical biographical essays or essays looking for a critical theme throughout one or several works.   The interface is a little hard to navigate through, but a treasure of co-located articles, so worth wading through.

Once you are in an Author's entry, use the Works Discussed link to see where in the entry the work is analyzed.  Clicking on the page numbers will allow you to jump to those pages where the work will be in bold script.

For BIOGRAPHICAL Information, consult MLA Bibliography. 

• Search author by Last name, First name
• IN the "Select a field" box, scroll down to choose "SA Primary Subject Author"

For criticism on particular works, or themes within a work

• Enter the title of a work
• IN the "Select a field" box, scroll down to choose "SA Primary Subject Work"

From within the full record of an abstract that discusses your work,  look for the hyperlinked-subject-keywords that reflect the themes that are discussed in this work and ones that run through other literature.

JSTOR and Project MUSE will also point to Journal articles about authors, works and themes, but these databases draw from a number of disciplines so you may need to narrow down search results by adding additional critical or thematic terms.  

While scholarly journals are published periodically, not all periodicals are scholarly.  Periodical sources would include newspaper reviews of books or plays, trade publications, society newsletters, etc.  ProQuest or Ebsco can help you out there 

Please note that MLA has a new 7th edition (2009).  Although the sites below offer helpful guidelines, please refer refer to the MLA guide (available at the Reference Desk) for most recent details. Please note that MLA has made access to web-based samples contingent upon buying their book.