English Language and Literature Resources

Finding Books

CONSORT is the shared catalog of the Kenyon, Denison, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wooster libraries.

OhioLINK includes the collections of 85 libraries throughout Ohio.

Kenyon students, faculty, and staff may request materials from other CONSORT or OhioLINK libraries. If you are unable to find an item in CONSORT or OhioLINK, try WorldCat, which contains the holdings of over 9,000 institutions worldwide. To request an item found in WorldCat, use Interlibrary Loan.

Reference Resources

Reference tools such as biographies, bibliographies, and encyclopedias can provide useful overviews of a topic, a time period, a genre, or an author's life and works. These are general literature reference tools, but keep in mind that there are also many author- or subject-specific resources in the reference collection, and that it might be helpful to browse the PN (general literature), PR (English literature), or PS (American literature) call number ranges to see if your topic is represented in a specialized reference work.

Literary Reference Center
Literary Reference Center is a comprehensive database that provides information on thousands of authors and their works. LRC includes plot summaries, articles of literary criticism, full text of literary journals, author biographies, book reviews, author interviews, and images of key literary figures.

The Literary Encyclopedia
A global literary reference work written by over 1500 specialists from universities around the world that currently provides over 4000 authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics.

Biography Index
Located in the reference collection: CT100 .B55.

Contemporary Authors
PN771 .C592, shelved on the Reference Index Tables near the Information Desk.

Dictionary of Literary Biography
These guides are shelved throughout the P call number range in the reference collection. Search by the title "dictionary of literary biography" in CONSORT to browse the available volumes.

Oxford English Dictionary
Search the full text of the entire 20-volume set for etymologies, definitions, and quotations. Also available in print in the reference collection: PE1625 .O87 1989.

Finding Journal Articles

CONSORT and OhioLINK don't contain information about individual articles within journals and don't always contain information about articles in anthologies or other book-format collections. Search an index or database to find citations to articles or, in many cases, the full text of the articles themselves.

When you've identified a promising article, check CONSORT or OhioLINK to determine which library holds the journal that you need. (Remember to search by the journal title, not the title of the article.) If Kenyon doesn't own the journal or it isn't available online, use Interlibrary Loan.

Literature and Film Indexes and Databases

ABELL-- Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (1920-1997)
ABELL provides citations to monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world.

OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center: Language and Literature Journals
Includes the full text of hundreds of literature and linguistics journals from Elsevier, Academic Press, Springer-Verlag, Kluwer and Project Muse.

Modern Languages Association Bibliography (MLA) (1963 -)
Citations to scholarly work in literature, linguistics, and folklore worldwide. Sources include journal and book articles, dissertations, monographs, and series.

Bibliography of American Literature

Film and Television Literature Index with Full Text

Film Literature Index

Humanities Indexes and Databases

Humanities International Complete
A comprehensive database covering 1700 journals, as well as books and reference sources in the humanities.

OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center: Arts and Humanities Journals
Includes the full text of hundreds of arts and humanities journals.

Arts and Humanities Citation Index (1990 - )
Indexes 1,100 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, as well as covering individually selected relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals.

Iter (Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 400-1700) (1983 - )
ITER is a bibliography of approximately 230,000 articles and reviews drawn from over 400 medieval and renaissance journal titles.

General Academic Databases

Academic Search Complete
This database provides full-text access to scholarly publications from nearly all areas of academic study.

JSTOR
Provides full-text access to scholarly journals; coverage generally begins with volume one of a journal, and ends 2-5 years from the present. Journals may be browsed or searched.

Full-Text Literature and Drama Databases

American Drama
Contains more than 700 plays from over 300 dramatists. When finished, American Drama will feature the complete texts of more than 2,000 plays written by American dramatists.

Early American Fiction
Contains 440 novels and short stories of 80 American writers, 1774-1850. Includes or has links to full text.

Early English Books Online
EEBO contains facsimile page images of works printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. The collection now contains about 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement.

Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare
The complete text of eleven major editions of Shakespeare's works from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6; twenty-four separate contemporary printings of individual plays; selected apocrypha and related works; and more than 100 adaptations, sequels, and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Eighteenth Century Fiction
Eighteenth Century Fiction provides the complete text of 96 works of prose fiction written in the British Isles between 1700 and 1780.

English Prose Drama
English Prose Drama is based on plays listed in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature that were written or intended for the stage and wholly or primarily in prose. Includes the plays of over 350 authors from the Renaissance to the 19th century.

English Verse Drama
English Verse Drama (EVD) contains the full text of over 2200 plays by more than 500 named authors and 300 anonymous works, from the Shrewsbury Fragments of the late Thirteenth Century through the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Women Writers Online
Published by the Women Writers Project at Brown University, this database offers full-text access to early modern writings by women (1400-1850) that include medical texts, natural history, and domestic manuals. Authors are primarily English and American.

Full-Text Poetry Databases

African-American Poetry Database
The Database of African-American Poetry (DAAP) contains the full text of almost 3,000 poems written between 1760 and 1900.

American Poetry, 1600-1900
The American Poetry Database (APD) contains the full text of over 40,000 poems by more than 200 writers from the 17th century to the early 20th century.

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry [Information Center CD-Rom] Includes 10,000 out-of-copyright poems in full text and 7,500 quotations from poems in copyright. It also indexes 135,000 poems in anthologies and collected works.

English Poetry 600-1900
The English Poetry database contains the full text of over 175,000 poems by over 1,400 poets from British Commonwealth and former colonies between the years 600 and 1900.

20th Century African-American Poetry
Contains 12,000 poems by more than 100 poets, including Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Rita Dove, and emerging poets. Biographical profiles accompany each poet's work.

20th Century American Poetry
Contains 52,000 poems from collected works and individual volumes of poetry covering the works of more than 300 twentieth-century American poets.

20th Century English Poetry
Contains over 44,000 poems by 288 poets.

Selected Internet Sites

These sites are just a small sample of English-literature-related web resources. When using the Internet for research, it is crucial to evaluate the authority and validity of your sources.