Get a leg up on literature, from Austen to Zola

Posted: Monday, January 3, 2011, 9:19 am

Working on a research paper about Moby Dick or writing a speech about the life of Jane Austen? Worthington Libraries offers three full-text research databases that can help with your next English class assignment.

Literature Online, Literary Reference Center (from Gale) and Literature Resource Center (from EBSCOhost) offer a variety of specialized tools for learning about literature.

Trying to track down the source of a line from a poem or a play? Try Literature Online to search for a word or phrase within a specific title, within the poetry or drama subcollections or across the entire database. Literature Online covers American and English poetry, short stories and fiction from the 16th through the 20th centuries.

Both Literary Reference Center and Literature Resource Center contain full-text versions of primary sources, thousands of author biographies, plot summaries, academic journal articles and book reviews.

Literary Reference Center allows you to browse through lists of titles and authors or the "most studied" listings in each category. Literary Reference Center also has links to full text editions of classics, such as Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales. Need to find the correct page number for a quotation? Instead of flipping through an entire book, you can download a PDF and use the search function to find the quoted text.

Literature Resource Center contains thousands of poems and short stories, along with plot summaries, journal articles and more than 130,000 author biographies. Multimedia content in the form of audio interviews, transcripts and pictures of authors is also available. For even more information about an author, Literature Resource Center has editorially-selected links to author websites and other sites relevant to an author's works.

Not sure how to cite an online source? Both databases offer tools that give you the proper citation information for every article in a variety of bibliographic citation styles. You can print out each article, download it to your computer for later use or send a copy of it to your personal email account.

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