LibGuides: English Literature: Reference Works

General Reference Resources

CREDO Reference
Online reference service offering access to more than two million full-text articles from multiple publishers, current

Current; CREDO Reference is the world's largest online reference service, offering access to 854+ electronic reference books on most subjects, including dictionaries, biographical sources, quotations, medicine, literature, music, technology, and many other interdisciplinary sources.
Gale Ebooks
Provides access to encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research

Gale Ebooks is a collection of ebooks that includes encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
Oxford Reference
Search 2 million entries spanning 25 subject areas across Oxford University Press dictionaries, companions, and encyclopedias, current.

Current; the core collection of Oxford Reference Online brings together 100 language and subject dictionaries and reference works published by the Oxford University Press into a single cross-searchable resource. The Premium Collection offers all of the above, plus added functionality and more detailed information across a broad subject range from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions Series, to enhance the coverage already provided by the Core Collection.
Sage Research Methods
Provides access to 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos by world-leading academics, current.

Current; SAGE Research Methods is the ultimate methods library with more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences, including the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher. The site is designed to guide users to the content they need to learn a little or a lot about their method. The Methods Map can help those less familiar with research methods to find the best technique to use in their research.

Dictionaries

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Provides access to more than 60,000 biographies, 72 million words, 11,000 portraits of figures in British history.

2004 edition; an illustrated collection of 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past, from the fourth century BC to the year 2001.
Oxford English Dictionary
Includes 600,000 words, 3.5 million quotations, and more than 1000 years of English, current.

The OED Online contains the complete text of the 20-volume Second Edition, first published in 1989, together with its 3-volume Additions Series, published in 1993 (volumes 1 and 2) and 1997 (volume 3). The OED is currently being revised, with the aim of producing a completely updated third edition by the year 2010. Draft material from the revision programme will also be published online, representing the latest progress towards the new edition. More revised and new entries will be added to the online Dictionary every quarter.

Encyclopedias

Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Provides access to editorially reviewed websites and the Encyclopedia Britannica, current.

Current; a reference site for students and educators synthesizing editorially reviewed websites and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Literature Resource Center (LRC)
Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analysis of authors, current.

Current; provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. The LRC covers more than 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, and indexes publications such as Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Authors.

Encyclopedia of Literature & Criticism
Electronic resource, edited by Martin Coyle.
Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (Gale)
"This Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive guide yet both to the nature and content of literature, and to literary criticism."
Encyclopedia of the Novel
Electronic version of the 2-volume print edition, published in 1998 by Fitzroy Dearborn, London. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Handbooks: Literature in General

Oxford Handbook: Further Reading
Brings together contributions by scholars working in the fields of literature, history, neuroscience, and disability studies to explore what we do when we read.
Oxford Handbook: The Unfinished Book
Assessing a wide variety of particular books, book-like objects, and book collections, and working with millennia of variable and conflicting definitions of the book and its purposes, The Unfinished Book surveys the many things that books have been, and uncovers why the book's grip on the cultural imagination remains so tenacious.
Oxford Handbook: Topics in Literature
Alternative title: Oxford Handbooks Online : Literature: Scholarly Research Reviews
Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies
This title considers how the architecture that enables human cognitive processing interacts with cultural and historical contexts.

Handbooks: American Literature

Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism
A ffers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately.
Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allen Poe
Handbook to the literature of Poe.
Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson
Essays about the poetry and life of Emily Dickinson.
Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Collection of critical essays on Emerson, a survey that approaches Emerson from the vantages of climate change, racial justice, print culture, and more.
Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South
Brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature.
Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman
Reflects the best new work in the field on Whitman.

Handbooks: British & Irish Literature

Oxford Handbook: Late Victorian into Modern
This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions of late Victorian and modern literature and culture.
Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800
A team of leading experts surveys the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity.
Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism
A omprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of recent research.
Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens
A comprehensive and up-to-date collection of essays on Dickens's life and works.
Oxford Handbook of Chaucer
This handbook addresses Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean culture, comparative European literature, vernacular theology and popular devotion.
Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe
This handbook offers the most comprehensive overview available of Defoe's life, times, writings, and reception.
Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser
Examines the entire canon of Spenser's work & the social & intellectual environments in which it was produced.
Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire
A guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' 18th century. It focuses on texts that appeared between 1660 and 1789.
Oxford handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England.
Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron
Presents 44 groundbreaking chapters that explore Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions.
Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today.
Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction
The volume brings an impressive variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction.
Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns
This handbook considers Burns's reception in his own time and beyond.
Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson
Organized into three sections that study Johnson's career, his major and lesser-known works, and the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, thinker, and moralist.
Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy
Offers critical, contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises.
Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance
Povides a single source of reference for dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement.
Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality and Race
Brings together 40 of the most important scholars writing on the subject today.
Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music
This volume showcases the latest international research into the subject of the many uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, extending from the Bard's own time to the present day.
Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race
This handbook presents current scholarship on race and racism in Shakespeare's works.
Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy
Offers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts.
Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare
This handbook presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on Shakespeare's period that it is hoped will prove useful to scholars of his poems and plays.
Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century.
Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England
The volume considers the production, reception, circulation, consumption, destruction, loss, modification, recycling, and conservation of books from different disciplinary perspectives.
Oxford handbook of Thomas More's Utopia
This handbook offers three different ways of thinking about the book - in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies.
Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture
Brings together a team of international scholars to offer the most comprehensive interdisciplinary guide to Victorian studies available in print.
Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf
Six sections focus on Woolf's life, her texts, her experiments, her life as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife.