The library offers a couple of databases that are useful for finding journal articles on topics in literature:

Academic Search Complete
Arts and Sciences Collections  
Literary Reference Center (LRC)
Literature Resource Center
MLA International Bibliography  
Oxford English Dictionary  
Project Muse 

These databases can be accessed via the Electronic Research Database page. A researcher can simply click on the name of the database to link directly to it.

Literature Resource Center

The Literature Resource Center offers biographical and critical information, Full Text, and also offers links to websites.

When you click on the link for the Literature Resource Center, you will automatically be taken to the search screen for Author searches. If you wish to search for biographical and critical information on an author, simply search from this screen.

For example, if you wanted to find biographical and critical information on Edgar Allan Poe, you cold simply type Poe, Edgar Allan in the Author search, or if you wanted to find similar information on Kate Chopin, you cold simply type Chopin, Kate in the Author search. Your results list will consist of Full Text articles on the writers' lives, and on interpretations of their works.

To get to the biographical information, simply click the tab at the top of the results screen that says Biographies. To get to the interpretations and criticism of his work, click the tab that says Literary Criticism, Articles, and Work Overviews. To get to a list of websites on Poe or Chopin, click on the tab that says Additional Resources. In addition, for some writers there will be a tab that says Bibliographies. This tab will lead to bibliographies, or lists of books and articles written about the author.

To run a Title search in the Literature Resource Center, click on the link that says Title when you first get to the search screen. Then in the first blank available, type in your title. For example, if you were looking for information on "The Awakening," by Chopin, you would type Awakening in the first blank. In the second blank, type the last name of your author, in this case Chopin. Again, at the top of your results list you will see tabs that allow you to navigate between biographical and critical articles on your topic.

MLA International Bibliography

The MLA International Bibliography offers Linked Full Text access to some critical articles, and offers access to bibliographic citations on a vast amount of literary criticism.

It is a little more user friendly than the LRC, but it contains only some Linked Full Text. Moreover, it is THE database for literature sources. When you click on the link for this database, you will be taken to a search page that looks exactly like the one you may be familiar with if you have used Academic Search Complete in the past. To search the MLA database, simply type the name of the work being researched in one blank, and the author's last name in the second blank.

For example, if you were to type Satanic Verses in the first blank and Rushdie in the second, you would get articles about his 1988 novel. By contrast, if you typed Outsiders in the first blank and Hinton in the second, or Awakening in the first blank and Chopin in the second, you would get one hits on those works.

It is important to note that some of these hits will be available in Linked Full Text (to see what these terms mean, click on this link). If a hit does NOT say Linked Full Text, then you must determine whether or not the library carries the book or journal in which the article can be found. It is very easy to determine whether you have a book article or journal article in this database, for the end of the entry will say either (book article) or (journal article). If you have a journal article that is NOT Linked Full Text, click on the link that says Search Nicholls Journal Holdings (ISSN). This will automatically open a new window which will give you the result of a search of our Online Public Access Catalog for that journal.

If we have the journal, you will see the "card catalog" entry come up, which will give you the journal's call number, location, and the number of volumes we own. If we do not have the journal, a message will come up telling you this. If you have a book article, then you need to determine the title of the book, and search our catalog for that title (HINT: The title usually occurs after the word IN and the editor(s) names). You will need to manually open a second browser window to search the catalog.

Others

The other databases that are potentially useful for literature searches are as follows:

Arts and Sciences Collections
     JSTOR's Arts and Sciences Collections offer full-text access to hundred of titles in many disciplines of the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, business and education. JSTOR is an archive and most of its journals have a 3-5 year moving wall.

Biography Resource Center
     Biography Resource Center provides access to award-winning GaleGroup reference sources and includes full-text articles from hundreds of periodicals. Search for people based on one or more personal facts such as birth and death year, nationality, ethnicity, occupation or gender.

Literary Reference Center
     Literary Reference Center (LRC) is a comprehensive literary reference database that provides a broad spectrum of reference information from antiquity to the present day. LRC is a completely full-text database that combines information from over 1,000 books and monographs, major literary encyclopedias and reference works, hundreds of literary journals, and unique sources not available anywhere else.

Project Muse
      Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from scholarly publishers.