Literary Criticism vs. Book Reviews
Book reviews tend to be written and published shortly after the book under review is published. Reviews tend to be written during a time contemporary to the work analyzed. They might appear in magazines, newspapers, scholarly journal articles, on a blog or a dedicated book review website. Book reviews are usually not the same as literary criticism, although they may be used in some literary approaches, e.g. reader-response, or when a work has not yet received much scholarly attention.
Find Dissertations and Theses Elsewhere
Start with these databases when searching for dissertations and theses written at other universities. You can request dissertations using Interlibrary Loan.
- Open Dissertations This link opens in a new windowEBSCO Open Dissertations makes electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) more accessible to researchers worldwide. The free portal is designed to benefit universities and their students and make ETDs more discoverable.
Content Includes:
1,500,000 electronic theses and dissertations
320 worldwide universities that have loaded their dissertations to date - Dissertations and Theses This link opens in a new windowLocate open access dissertations and theses free of charge. Full text.
- Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) This link opens in a new windowOATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open-access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1000 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 2,960,883 theses and dissertations.
- Dissertation Express This link opens in a new windowDissertation Express is the fastest and least expensive way to obtain the dissertation(s) you would like to order. Dissertations ordered through Dissertation Express are available in PDF or bound copy formats. Dissertations are shipped by courier delivery to your home, school, or office. Select from over two million titles available from ProQuest. If you are looking for a known item to see if we have it available, you can try finding it on Dissertation Express. The site can be searched by keywords, author name, title, or publication number.
Discipline-Specific
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowProduced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the bibliography directs researchers to more than 3 million citations from journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, scholarly websites, editions, and translations published from the late 19th century to the present.
MLA International Bibliography covers a broad range of humanities subjects, including world languages and literature, linguistics, dramatic arts, film, folklore, rhetoric and writing studies, the teaching of language, and the history of publishing. Its expansive scope also makes it an excellent resource for research in history, philosophy, communications, and cross-disciplinary subjects such as gender studies and area studies.
Content Includes:
3,100,000 records
25,000 indexed journals and book series
2,000 book publishers - PsycINFO This link opens in a new windowThis ever-expanding collection of behavioral and social science research, dissertations, and scholarly literature abstracts offer a broad view of the field. With relevance to a host of related disciplines, including neuroscience, business, nursing, law, and education. APA PsycInfo delivers the peer-reviewed content and abstracts students and researchers need and does so with remarkable precision and a dedication to scholarly and scientific excellence.
Focused on the interdisciplinary aspects of worldwide behavioral and social science research and literature, APA PsycInfo is a resource for locating scholarly research findings in psychology and related fields across a host of academic disciplines.
Features include:
Coverage dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries, with extensive coverage from the 1800s to the present
Authored and edited books and book chapters
Dissertations selected from Dissertation Abstracts International (Sections A and B)
Publications from more than 50 countries
Journals published in 29 languages
Meta Search Box
Looking for a specific journal, magazine, or newspaper?
Use Journals List to search for the title of a journal, magazines, or newspaper and tell if the library offers online access or print access to that publication.
- Journals List VideoWatch this short video if you want to see an example search with remote access.
Find books, eBooks, movies, music, government information, and more in the Library Catalog.
Find librarian-created research tips, information about library services, and more on the Blume Library website.
You can browse course information guides and topic guide under the Research Help tab on the Blume Library homepage.
Literature Background
The databases listed below are also searchable through Discover:
Book Review Sites
- Book Review Digest Plus This link opens in a new windowUnlike reviews on book-sale sites and the open web, many of the reviews in Book Review Digest Plus are from citable journals, making it an invaluable resource for literary and biographical research.
Subject indexing, summaries, annotations, and grade-level designations make this a useful tool for reader's advisory, collection development, and curriculum support.
Content Includes:
600,000 full-text book reviews
2,400,000 review citations
5,000 indexed journals with citations to every book review
50,000 new reviews are added each year
Coverage Dates: 1983 - present - Choice Reviews This link opens in a new windowSince its founding in 1964, Choice has led the industry in high-quality evaluations of nonfiction academic writing. Choice Reviews and its print companion, Choice magazine, are invaluable sources of bibliographic reference and recommendation for both collection development and individual research. Choice Reviews and Choice publish 4,200 new reviews annually, contain over 200,000 reviews of academic monographs, and serve 2,400 institutions worldwide.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new windowA great place to find book reviews that appear in newspapers and magazines. It is not a good source for reviews published in scholarly journals.
- Historical Newspapers: New York Times with Index This link opens in a new windowThis historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers, and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the time's politics, society, and events.
The Historical New York Times with Index (1851-1993) provides search capability using subject terms and topics for focused and targeted results in combination with searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the Historical New York Times.
Coverage: 1851 - 2019
Subject coverage - Historical local, regional, national and international news
Literary Web Sites
- American Literature Internet ResourcesIncludes selective links to online texts and to American literature sites by genre as well as to a list of pages devoted to specific writers. The LibGuide is maintained by Winnie Shyam at the Buley Library, Southern Connecticut State University.
- Discovering Literature: Romantics and VictoriansDiscover 1,200 Romantic and Victorian literary treasures from the British Library.
- Romantic CirclesA peer-reviewed website covering the study of Romantic-period (approximately 1760-1850) literature and culture.
- Victorian Women Writers ProjectIncludes lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more.