Library Guides: ENGL 288: Theory and Investigation: Literary Critisism

Criticism

Literary criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of works of literature. Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting or historical or political context. It usually includes discussion of the work’s content and integrates your ideas with other insights gained from research. Literary criticism may have a positive or a negative bias and may be a study of an individual piece of literature or an author’s body of work.

Although criticism may include some of the following elements in order to support an idea, literary criticism is NOT a plot summary, a biography of the author, or simply finding fault with the literature.

Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better sense of the work, form judgments about literature, study ideas from different points of view, and determine on an individual level whether a literary work is worth reading.

Examples of some types of literary criticism are:

Biographical
Comparative
Ethical
Expressive
Feminist
Historical
Mimetic
Pragmatic
Psychological
Social
Textual
Theoretical

Databases

MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature.
The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Department of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. Such international coverage is represented by literature from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, and while the majority of records are from English-language publications, at least sixty other languages are represented including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish.
Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive This link opens in a new window
This rich, easy-to-navigate database is ideal for students and researchers of English literature and other humanities or social science subjects. Unparalleled opportunities for tracking the literary activity and critical opinion makers of the 20th century are now possible in a powerful digital environment. More than 250,000 reviews, letters, poems and articles in more than 5,000 issues of the TLS are available, and-for the first time-the identities of anonymous contributors are disclosed.