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In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate using the Literature Resources from Gale database.
Starting at the library’s home page, click on library guides, then click on the plus
symbol next to the word Literature. There are several literature library guides for
specific courses and a general literature guide. You’ll find the same databases in
any of these guides. Clicking on the general literature guide reveals
databases that allow you to search for critical essays of specific literary works and authors.
One of the largest literary databases in our collection is Literature Resources from Gale.
The system requires you to log in using your X-ID as the borrower ID and your 6-digit birthday
as the PIN. Once you click login, you will be able to search for analysis of the author’s
work. In this database, typing the name of the author is usually the best search. I want
to find criticism on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” so I start by clicking
the circle next to “Person by or About.” As I type the author’s last name, I see
a list of authors and I can click on the correct one.
Clicking the search button, will result in hundreds of essays by professional literary
critics. The tabs across the top give you access to
specific types of secondary sources. The first tab Literature criticism and the third tab
for Topics and work overviews will give you the best analysis essays. The tabs for biographies
and reviews are going to be less useful. So starting with the Literature criticism
tab, you can see that there are 455 professional essays on many works by Hawthorne. The links
on the left will help you narrow down your search to a specific work that you are trying
to find. If we click on Young Goodman Brown, we see
that we’ve narrowed it down to 29 essays that talk about the story. The essays in this
tab, are usually articles that have been published in professional literature journals.
The links on the left only apply to the tab that you are on when you click on them. So
now if we were to click on the Topic and Work Overviews tab, you would have to click on
“Young Goodman Brown” again to narrow the results only to essays about that work.
The essays in the Topics and Work Overview tab have been written specifically for reference
books that analyze literature in special ways. For example, in this source Characters in
19th Century Literature, the essay summarizes the plot and analyzes the characters in the
story. In this source, Literature and its Times,
the analysis is more historical in nature. The author first analyzes the events in history
at the time the short story takes place. Then he analyzes the story in a section called
the short story in focus. Finally, the analysis ends with a look at the events in history
at the time the short story was written. At the bottom of the essay, the database provides
a citation for the source. Remember to use the literary resources citation handout to
verify that the citation provided in the database is correct.
At the top of the screen, this database also gives you the option to print, email, or download
the essay. If you need help using this database, contact
a librarian.