There are many ways to locate literary criticism. Choose one or all of the options listed below depending upon how much information you need to find.

• Excerpts of criticism
• Books and book chapters
• Scholarly articles
• Book reviews
• Additional sources

When to use them.
There are many books and online resources in Skillman's reference collection that contain excerpts of criticism. Start with these if you want to locate a small amount of information quickly or if you want to get an idea of the type of material available on the work you're researching.

How to find them.
Below are details on two of the largest series with critical excerpts.

Literature Resource Center
An online collection from the Gale Group that includes biographies, bibliographies, critical essays, work overviews, author-related websites, and an events timeline. Choose the "literary criticism" tab after performing an author or title search to access excerpts drawn from the Gale's print titles, including:

• Contemporary Literary Criticism
  Location: Skillman Ref PN771 .C59
  Covers authors who are living or who died after 1959. (Complete content from volume 95 on is available online; selected content from volumes 1-94 online.)
   
• Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
  Location: Skillman Ref PN771 .G27
  Covers authors who died between 1900 and 1959. (Selected content online.)
   
• Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
  Location: Skillman Ref PN761 .N56
  Covers authors who lived between 1800 and 1900. (Selected content online.)
   
• Shakespearean Criticism
  Location: Skillman Ref PR2965 .S44
  Includes excerpted commentary and criticism on Shakespeare's works from the sixteenth century to the present. (Selected content online.)

The Literature Resource Center contains only selected content from the print volumes. For an index to the complete content of the print series listed above, use the Gale Literary Index.
 

Library of Literary Criticism series
Connect to the Lafayette Library catalog to locate the following titles in Skillman Library:

• Major Modern Dramatists
• Modern American Literature
• Modern Arabic Literature
• Modern Black Writers
• Modern British Literature
• Modern French Literature
• Modern German Literature
• Modern Latin American Literature
• Modern Romance Literatures
• Modern Slavic Literatures
• Modern Women Writers

How to cite them.
Both the Gale Group series and the Library of Literary Criticism series include publication information for the criticism they excerpt. In many cases, you will want to use the library catalog to locate the full version of an essay that has been republished in one of these books. If you decide to cite an excerpt directly from the Gale or Library of Literary Criticism series books, consult the examples below for MLA-style citations:

- Stewart, Jack F. “Color in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 31 (1985): 438-58. Excerpted in Literature Resource Center. Infotrac. Lafayette College Libraries, Easton. 2 February 2004 <http://galenet.galegroup.com/>. [The date immediately preceding the URL would be the date you last accessed the document.]

- Fiedler, Leslie A. “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!” Partisan Review June 1948: 664-71. Excerpted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon K. Hall. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale, 1982. 467-68.

- Bellow, Saul. Commentary June 1952: 608-09. Excerpted in Modern Black Writers. A Library of Literary Criticism. Ed. Michael Popkin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. 189-90. [In cases like this where the citation is incomplete, provide as much information as you can.]

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When to use them.
Books can provide detailed criticism and analysis of an author's works. Even if you don't have time to read an entire book, you can often find a single chapter that's relevant to your topic. Or, use the book's index to locate those pages that talk about the points you're most interested in.

How to find them.
Use the library catalog to find books about a single author or literary work.

• Find books that are devoted to criticism of an author or literary work by performing a subject search (not an author search) for the author you are researching. Enter the last name first (e.g., morrison toni). Look for the subheading "criticism and interpretation" to find books that analyze an author's works. Look for a subheading that includes a title to find books about an individual work (e.g., morrison toni beloved).
   
• Find book chapters or essays in anthologies by performing a keyword search using a literary work's title (e.g., "one hundred years of solitude"). For works not originally published in English, use the untranslated title as well (e.g., "cien años de soledad"). In some cases, using a shortened version of a literary work's title may result in a few additional sources (e.g., "huck finn").
   
• Find bibliographies of criticism written about much-studied authors and their works by performing a subject search for the author you are researching. Look for the subheading "bibliography" (e.g., faulkner william bibliography). Bibliographies often provide the most complete list of critical writing about a particular author. They also usually include annotations describing the content of these critical works.

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When to use them.
Articles are more narrowly focused than books. Use articles from scholarly journals when doing in-depth research or when you're interested in a specific aspect of an author's work. For example, it would be easier to find an article about the theme of marriage in Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country than one that provides an overview of her works.

How to find them.
To locate scholarly literary criticism, first use one of the databases below to locate references to articles. Then check the library catalog to see if the library has the journal in which the article is published. Scholarly articles can also be located by using bibliographies as explained above.

MLA International Bibliography
Index of articles, edited books, and dissertations on literature and languages from 1926 to the present. Produced by the Modern Language Association. See our MLA guide for help searching this index.

Literature Online
Literature Online's Criticism & Reference (Criticism) search page provides access to the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), the Cambridge University Press's New Essays on the American Novel series, and additional full-text online journals. A link to the "Criticism & Reference" page is available from the Literature Online home page. Choose the "Criticism" link near the top of the page to limit your search to these sources. See our Literature Online guide for help using this database.

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When to use them.
The distinction between literary criticism and book reviews is not always clear. Influential critics like William Dean Howells, T. S. Eliot, and Edmund Wilson (to name a few) wrote critical reviews for publications like Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic—none of which would be considered a scholarly journal.
 
Use book reviews when you want to document the critical reception of a book at its time of publication or when you can establish the scholarly credentials of the reviewer.

How to find them.
Many book reviews are excerpted in the series described above. To locate additional reviews, consult our guide to finding book reviews.

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When to use them.

The library has a significant number of books that discuss national literatures, literary movements, or recurring literary themes. Many of these devote chapters or large sections to individual authors or particular literary works. In most cases, you will be consulting these sources after finding a citation to them in another book or essay.

How to find them.
The best way to find out if one of these books includes a discussion of a particular author is to consult a bibliography of criticism written about your subject. If one is not available, the following strategies can be used in searching the library's catalog.

• Find books about a particular national literature by performing a subject search that combines the name of a nationality or region with subheadings as shown in the examples below. Each of these searches will result in a list of different titles. (You may disregard punctuation and capitalization when entering the phrase in the search box.)
   
       American literature
       American literature -- History and criticism
       Latin American fiction
       Latin American fiction -- History and criticism
   
  
• Find books that focus on works written during a particular period by performing a subject search that combines the name of a nationality or region with the word "literature" and a date. Look for books under both the main heading (i.e., French literature -- 16th century) and applicable subdivisions (i.e., French literature -- 16th century -- History and criticism).
   
  Books focusing on literary works written after 1800 are subdivided by century (e.g., Russian literature -- 20th century). Period subdivisions for American, English, French, German and Spanish literature before 1800 are as follows:
   
       American literature -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
       American literature -- Revolutionary period, 1775-1783
       American literature -- 1783-1850
       English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500
       English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700
       French literature -- To 1500
       French literature -- 16th century
       French literature -- 17th century
       German literature -- Old High German, 750-1050
       German literature -- Middle High German, 1050-1500
       German literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700
       Spanish literature -- To 1500
       Spanish literature -- Classical period, 1500-1700
   
  Other helpful period subdivisions include:
   
       Classical literature
       Literature, Medieval
       European literature -- Renaissance, 1450-1600
   
• Find books about a particular literary movement or theme by performing a subject search that combines a word related to your topic with the phrase "in literature" (e.g, marriage in literature or naturalism in literature). Library of Congress Subject Headings are not always consistent, so you may want to try some keyword searches that combine a word related to your topic with the phrase "and literature."

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