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. 

Welcome to the revised English Literature Research Areas Guide! 

This guide serves as a starting point for researching literature. The guide is organized into three main sections: British literature, American literature, and interdisciplinary fields related to literary studies. 

Each guide page is devoted to literature related to a particular time period, perspective, or topic. On each page, you will find:

• A selection of books and ebooks from our catalog
• Suggested search terms
• Call number locations and library map for finding books in the Main Library
• Contextual Resources
• Best Databases 
• Focused literary journals
• Free web resources, often primary source repositories curated by museums, special collections, and other academic libraries

You can scroll through these sections or use the side navigation panel to quickly jump to a section of interest.

• Check out the Library's Citation Help Guide for examples of citing sources in APA, MLA, and Chicago Formatting
• BrowZine allows you to browse scholarly journals made available by the University of Iowa Libraries on mobile devices, meaning you can access thousands of scholarly journals wherever you have Wi-Fi access. You can create a personal library of up to 64 journal publications and get alerts to when a new issue has been published one of your favorited titles. 
• Use our Document Delivery System to request a scanned copy of an article or book chapter delivered right to your desktop. Inter-Library Loan (ILL) allows you to request books, journal articles, and other research materials not owned by the University of Iowa Libraries for use in your research.
• The Writing University offers podcasts and archives from University of Iowa's creative writing programs 
• Use the University of Iowa Library's ebook collection to locate curated collections of titles related to the humanities and interdisciplinary studies
• Did you know you that InfoHawk+ generates citations? After you open an article or book record in the catalog, scroll to the bottom to find the "Send To" heading. There, you will find a citation icon and the option to generate a full reference citation in MLA, Chicago, APA, Harvard, or Vancouver styles. 

We hope that you enjoy the resources presented in this guide! Whether you are looking for sources for a course assignment or curious to learn more about a new topic, there is a plethora of information waiting to be discovered in this guide. Happy reading (and searching)!

This guide was revised and updated by Catie Reynolds, a Library and Information Science graduate student, in the Fall of 2025.