English
Primary, Secondary, Tertiary (Reference) Sources for English and American Literature
About this guide
Guide content supports the teaching and research goals of multiple departments on campus. Content represents a non-exhaustive selection of essential resources and tools for engaging a wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints.
Updated webpage:
This page has been updated. Please go to the new guide: https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/english
Welcome!
Getting Started
This guide will provide a general overview of resources available for English and American Literature.
For more specific resources based on research areas within the English Department, consult the English Research Areas guide.
General Research Tips
- Generate a list of your search terms and any synonyms.
- Search for each term in databases or InfoHawk+.
- If searching for a phrase, insert quotation marks around the phrase.
- Limit your search by a date range if you want results from certain years.
- Try your search terms in multiple databases.
- Look at the footnotes and bibliography of scholarly articles - they can lead you to related sources!
- The first sources that you find may not be the best. Keep looking!
Helpful Resources
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Academic Search Elite This link opens in a new windowThis multi-disciplinary database offers full text for nearly 2,000 scholarly journals, including more than 1,500 peer-reviewed titles. Covering virtually every area of academic study, Academic Search Elite offers full text information dating as far back as 1985. This database is updated on a daily basis.
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JSTOR (Journal Storage) This link opens in a new windowProvides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each titles. Journals may be searched across multiple titles as well as by the individual titles below
Note that this database comprises mostly back issues: for most titles the JSTOR database does NOT include full text of the most recent 3 to 5 years. -
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new windowA fully searchable library of over 350,000 works of English and American literature, overseen by an academic advisory board.
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MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO Version) This link opens in a new windowThe MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature. The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers.
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Project Muse This link opens in a new windowWith full text for well over 300 journal titles from university publishers, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others. Coverage begins in 1995.
