This guide will help you locate criticism for Literature, Film, and Drama.
See the English Libguide for more assistance with Literary Criticism.
See the English Databases List for more resources.
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:
Literary criticism in essays shortened from their original published versions can be found in the first two databases. Full text databases follow.
Explore an authoritative source of literary criticism, summarizing authors' lives and works and including excerpts from scholarly articles. IMPORTANT NOTE: Because this source is an encyclopedic work, it should NEVER be directly cited. Always look up the original source of the excerpted and reprinted articles. Coverage: varies. Mostly full text.
If you already have a newspaper citation, and need to locate the article, use the following steps:
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