Use these tips and search examples to find literary criticism in Library databases:
Connect keywords with AND.
Use author's last name only. (Spelling counts!)
Put quotation marks around titles that contain more than one word.
If you are finding too many articles that are not literary criticism (e.g., book or film reviews), try adding the word criticism to your search:
Or, look for limiters on your search results screen to help focus in on what you want.
These literature databases contain critical articles (literary criticism) on specific works:
Includes biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.
Full text literature database with information from reference books, literary journals, magazines, study guides, and videos.
Comprehensive coverage of critical essays from the Contemporary Literary Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Poetry Criticism series.
These databases contain some critical articles (literary criticism), as well as non-critical articles related to your author or specific work:
General article database for over 175 subjects from magazines, journals, and newspapers, including peer-reviewed and scholarly works.
General topic database that includes articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers.
These databases contain articles from online reference works, and can be useful for finding biographical/overview information on your author, a literary genre, a specific time period/historical event, or a definition of a literary term. These are not likely to contain critical articles (literary criticism):
Collection of over 600 full-text reference books that cover thousands of topics including art, business, medicine, sociology, technology, and much more.
These databases contain e-books (searchable online versions of print books) that may contain literary criticism on specific works, or biographical/overview information on your author:
Includes authoritative e-books that cover a wide range of subject areas. Most books can be downloaded to various devices.
If you are not finding literary criticism on a specific work in the Library databases, try searching for online versions of critical books:
How much of the actual book you will be able to see online will vary from book to book.