Comparative Literature Subject Guide « Colorado College Tutt Library

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Comparative Literature Subject Guide

Humanities Liaison Librarian

Steve Lawson
Tutt Library Room 173
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Getting Started
Finding Books
Finding Articles
Course Guides

Getting Started

When getting started on a project, you may want to get some background information from reference sources. Some good options for Comparative Literature are:

Reference Guide to World Literature covers authors and their works in world literature. Author entries contain a bibliography of the author’s works and of critical studies. (Also in the print reference section: TIGER record)

The Johns Hopkins Guide To Literary Theory & Criticism for information on critics and criticism.

Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary (link to TIGER record) has entries on literary movements worldwide, and is indexed by author, and country.

Finding Books

Searching

Searching TIGER by keyword or subject is often the fastest way to find books about your topic.

For books that we don’t own here at Colorado College, or books that are checked out or otherwise unavailable, use Prospector - Colorado Unified Catalog . You’ll find books (and CDs, DVDs, etc.) in libraries across Colorado that you can request and have sent to the Tutt Library circulation desk where you can check them out.

For books not available in TIGER or Prospector, you can request through Interlibrary Loan via WorldCat .

Please ask a librarian if you need help with TIGER, Prospector, or WorldCat.

Browsing

Books on languages and literature are assigned call numbers that begin with a P. Here is an overview of the call numbers for languages and literature:

P Philology; Linguistics
- including P306-301 Translating and interpreting
PA Greek language and literature; Latin language and literature
PB Modern languages; Celtic languages
PC Romanic languages
PD Germanic languages
PE English language
PF West Germanic languages
PG Slavic languages; Baltic languages; Albanian language
PH Uralic languages; Basque language
PJ Oriental philology and literature
PK Indo-Iranian philology and literature
PL Languages of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
PM Hyperborean, Indian, and artificial languages
PN Literature (General)
- including general works of literary criticism and theory (works on specific authors and works are shelved with that author’s works)
PQ French literature – Italian literature – Spanish literature – Portuguese literature
PR English literature
PS American literature
PT German literature – Dutch literature – Flemish literature since 1830 – Scandinavian literature – Old Norse literature: Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian – Modern Icelandic literature – Faroese literature – Danish literature – Norwegian literature – Swedish literature
PZ Fiction and juvenile belles lettres

Finding Articles

MLA International Bibliography is the best source for finding literary critical journal articles in comparative literature at CC. MLA also indexes books and book chapters; to locate these, look up the book title in TIGER.

Complete list of databases for Comparative Literature

ARTFL Project, University Of Chicago: Coverage: Medieval to 20th Century; Consists of nearly 2000 French texts. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. The 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of 17th century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts.
Black Drama: Coverage: 1850 - current; Contains the full text of approximately 1,200 rare and hard-to-find plays written from the 1850's to the present by playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African Diaspora countries. Search by author, title, subject, date, full-text, etc.
Children's Literature Review: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Criticism of classic to modern children's authors. Part of Literature Critcism Online
Classical And Medieval Literature Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Early to present-day criticism of early literature, philosophy, and other works. Part of Literature Criticism Online
The Columbia Granger's World Of Poetry: Coverage: 1500 - current; The definitive source in English for locating a poem in anthologies. Includes 13,000 poems in full text, and 250,000 poetry citations, in addition to commentaries, biographies, bibliographies, notes on form, and a glossary of prosodic terms.
Contemporary Authors: Coverage: current; A bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in Nonfictions, etc. Complete biographical and references for more than 90,000 authors in the U.S.
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Criticism of living authors, or authors who died since 1960. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Drama Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. A full range of criticism on each playwright included. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Coverage: 1701-1800; Digitized copies of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
Grants And Awards Available To American Writers: With more than 1,000 listings of domestic and foreign grants, literary awards, fellowships and residencies, Grants & Awards is the most comprehensive online database available to writers of all income brackets, at work in all genres, and at various levels of achievement. See Reference Librarian for password.
Humanities International Complete: Coverage: 1929 - current; A comprehensive humanities database, with almost 500 full text titles and indexing and abstracting for more than 1,700 titles. Subject areas include (but are not limited to) literature, philosophy, the arts, history, culture-oriented and multi-disciplinary humanities titles with some coverage going back as far as 1929. This database replaces Humanities Abstracts.
The Johns Hopkins Guide To Literary Theory & Criticism: Coverage: N/A; Searchable, full-text online version of the well known reference to the intellectual traditions of literary theory.
L'année Philologique: Coverage: 1969 - 1999; Standard index to monographs, journals and essay collections in classics (Ancient Greek and Roman language, literature, history and religion), covering essentially all books and about 1,500 periodicals published each year in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. Citations only, in English or French.
Literary Index: Coverage: current; Master index to every literary series published by Gale Research Inc. Combines and cross-references author names, including pseudonyms and variant names, and titles into one source.
Literature Criticism From 1400 To 1800: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Criticism of works published from the late Middle Ages through the end of the seventeenth century. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Literature Criticism Online: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Covers literature from the classical era to today in all genres
LitFinder: Coverage: 1500 - current; The best source for contemporary and older poems in full text. Includes more than 100,000 full-text poems, 800,000 citations and excerpts, and hundreds of images, biographies, and critical essays, plus some short stories and essays.
MLA International Bibliography: Coverage: 1963 - current; Literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore from over journals and series published worldwide.
Nineteenth-century Literature Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Chronologically-arranged criticism of authors of the nineteenth century. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Oxford English Dictionary: Coverage: 1884 - current; Online version of the well-known historical dictionary of English, The Oxford English Dictionary, covering the language from the earliest times to the present day, showing not only the current meanings of words, but also tracing their development through time.
Poetry Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Biographical sketches and bibliographies of the poets, in addition to a wide selection of criticism. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Shakespearean Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Includes critical interpretations of Shakespeare from the 17th century to the present. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Short Story Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Historical survey of the critical response to included authors. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Twentieth-century Literary Criticism: Online, full-text literary criticism, anthologized and excerpted from books and journal articles. Criticism on major literary and nonfiction writers of the twentieth century. Part of Literature Criticism Online
Women Writers Online: Coverage: 1400 - 1850; Contains fulltext of nearly 400 works of early modern women writers.
The World Shakespeare Bibliography: Coverage: 1962 - current; Provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare.

Online journal archives

Unlike the subject-specific article databases, these online journal archives don’t concentrate on any one academic subject. Instead, they take leading journals from many fields, or all the journals from one publisher, and provide extensive archives of the full text of those journals online, usually in the form of PDF files.

Blackwell Journals: Coverage: varies; usually late 1990's to current; Searchable collection of full text periodicals. Scholarly sources.
JSTOR: Coverage: late 1800's - most recent 5 years; Archival access to many scholarly periodicals. Jstor does not cover the most recent three years of most journals.
Oxford University Press Journals: Coverage: varies; usually late 1990's - current; A searchable collection of full text periodicals. Scholarly sources.
Periodicals Archive Online: Coverage: 1770-1995; Fulltext journal collection covering the humanities and social sciences. Includes 500 journal titles covering the first issue of the journal until 1995.
Project Muse: Coverage: 1993 - current; Project Muse provides access to the full text of the Johns Hopkins University Press journals. Offers current and back issues.

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