Finding Literary Criticism in the Library

You will probably have much more success finding literary criticism offline than online. Here is a brief guide to help you find literary criticism in your local school or public library.

To find criticism in the library, you're going to want to look for articles or books about the author you're writing about.

Finding books is fairly straightforward, no different than finding books about any other subject you're interested in. Search for your on your author's name as a subject in the online catalog and see what displays. The most useful ones for literary criticism will include the phrase "criticism and interpretation" as part of the subject.

Example: Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400--Criticism and interpretation.

Because the official subject headings for authors usually included their birth and/or death dates, you may have to experiment a bit to find the right subject heading--start by just trying the author's name with no extension and work from there. If you have trouble, be sure to ask the librarian.

Finding articles is a little bit trickier and may take some time and patience. First of all, when you look for articles you need to use indexes, usually called "periodical indexes." "Periodical" means any publication that appears periodically: that is, a specific number of issues are published at specific intervals in a given year. There are several kinds of periodicals: some are published daily, such as newspapers; monthly, such as magazines; or quarterly, such as some academic journals.

Indexes to periodicals may be published in book form or available online.  Talk to your reference librarian; he or she will know which index will be most useful for your project.

Regardless of what index you use, you will find citations: brief descriptions of articles (called abstracts--sometimes abstracts are very long, and sometimes just a sentence or two), with the article's title, author, publication date, page numbers and the title of the journal. This citation information allows you to easily locate the article within the periodical.

When you get your list of citations, you then need to find out where the journals are located. Why aren't call numbers and/or locations listed in the indexes? Because most libraries use the same indexes, and buy the same kinds of journals, but not all libraries organize their journals the same way. Check the listing of journals to see if we carry the title for the date you need (we only keep the latest 5 years on the shelf).

Then, after you track down all your material, you'll probably find that some of it is helpful to you and some of it is not. Welcome to the world of research!
 

This pathfinder was created by Ken Irwin, but it is based in part on work by Nettie Lagace and Sara Ryan.  It has been edited to fit the local situation.

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