LibGuides: Lang&Lit: EH201 & 202 -- Survey of American Literature: Find Books

Selection of Circulating Books

These are some noteworthy titles available through Houston Cole Library. HCL provides some books in print format, some in electronic format, and some in both. The catalog record for each book indicates the formats in which it is available.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing by Dale M. Bauer (Editor); Philip Gould (Editor)
Call Number: PS147.C36 2001
ISBN: 0521669758
Publication Date: 2001-11-15
The Cambridge History of American Literature (8 vols.) by Sacvan Bercovitch, ed.
Call Number: PS92.C34 1994
Publication Date: 1994
A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America by Charles L. Crow (Editor)
Call Number: PS169.R45C66 2003
ISBN: 0631226311
Publication Date: 2003-07-09
A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus (Editor); Werner Sollors (Editor)
Call Number: PS92.N39 2009
ISBN: 9780674035942
Publication Date: 2009-09-23
The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 by Dickson D. Bruce
ISBN: 0813920671
Publication Date: 2001-11-22

Library Catalog Basic Search

Search for eBooks

Start with these Databases to Locate Books

To find books on a topic, you can either search the Library Catlaog using the above search widget or you can search one of the following databases:

ACLS Humanities E-Book This link opens in a new window
ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is an online collection of approximately 3,700 books of high quality in the humanities, accessible through institutional and individual subscription. These titles are offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twenty-five learned societies, over 100 contributing publishers, and the MPublishing Division of the University of Michigan Library. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars. Fields currently covered include area studies in the following: Australasian/Oceanian, Byzantine, Canadian, Caribbean, Central European, Jewish Studies, Native Peoples of the Americas, Women’s Studies. Historical studies include African, American, Asian, Comparative/World, Eastern European/Russian, Economic, European, Latin American, Legal, Medicine, Methods/Theory, Middle East, and Science/Technology. HEB also encompasses the fields of Archaeology, Art and Architectural History, Biblical Studies, Bibliographic Studies, Film and Media Studies, Folklore, History of the Book, Literature, Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Musicology, Performance Studies (theater, music, dance, performance), Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology. HEB now includes monographs, critical studies, primary sources, reference works and volumes of essays.
Individual titles are accessible through the Library Catalog.
Ebook Central
eLibrary® delivers full-text and multimedia reference essentials through an easy-to-use interface. Students and researchers can find the information they need from more than 2,500 full-text magazines, newspapers, books, and transcripts--plus thousands of maps, pictures, educator-approved websites from Homework Central®, and top-quality multimedia (audio/video) files. Results can be sorted by relevance, date, file size, Lexile or reading level, publication, and source. Librarians and other educators can find content that's directly linked to state and national teaching standards.
EBSCO eBook Collection
More than 60 electronic book collections from some of the world’s most renowned STM publishing houses, including Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley InterScience®.

More information regarding EBSCO's eBook Collection may be found on the University of Texas libraries website located here:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/titles.php?id=260#what
An EBSCOhost product
Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL)
- This link opens in a new window
A single source for e-reference for students, professionals, students, and general readers. More than 7,000 authoritative full-text titles are offered from Gale and Gale's publishing partners, addressing eighteen widely-studied subject areas. For more more information on Gale's publishing partners, go here

http://www.gale.cengage.com/servlet/GvrlFP?msg=ma
A Gale Cengage database | some titles provided by the AVL

Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies, and music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.
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For more information about the Internet Archive and related projects, go here

http://archive.org/about/

Oxford Reference Online Premium
Oxford Reference Online brings together language and subject reference works from one of the world's biggest and most trusted reference publishers into a single cross-searchable resource. The Premium Collection offers a huge range of fully-indexed, extensively linked, up to date, and cross-searchable dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press, including detailed information across a broad subject range from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions series.
The Premium Collection includes a superb range of Oxford titles, updated regularly with an expanding range of key titles in the acclaimed Oxford Companions and Oxford Dictionaries series, plus the Visual English Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and new heavily illustrated natural history titles such as the Encyclopedia of Mammals. This means a total of over 1.4 million entries, including longer, in-depth, signed entries with bibliographies.

Subscribers to the Premium Collection also benefit from excellent search functionality which makes it easy to choose between longer or shorter entries from subject reference titles, definitions from English or bilingual dictionaries, and quotations.

The Premium Collection is updated regularly with new titles, new editions, new entries, full-color maps and illustrations, timelines, weblinks, and bibliographies.
Provided by the AVL and JSU
Salem Literature Titles
Salem Literature Titles provides access to a growing number of reference works both in traditional, printed and online formats. Salem Literature is an online database that includes the complete content of printed reference sets. Salem currently offers several series, including the Critical Insights series, which focuses on important authors and works of literature.

http://www.literature.salempress.com/

Search for Electronic Reference Books

Start with these Databases to Locate Reference Books

To find reference books on a topic, you can either search the Library Catlaog using the above search widget or you can search one of the following databases:

Ebook Central
eLibrary® delivers full-text and multimedia reference essentials through an easy-to-use interface. Students and researchers can find the information they need from more than 2,500 full-text magazines, newspapers, books, and transcripts--plus thousands of maps, pictures, educator-approved websites from Homework Central®, and top-quality multimedia (audio/video) files. Results can be sorted by relevance, date, file size, Lexile or reading level, publication, and source. Librarians and other educators can find content that's directly linked to state and national teaching standards.
Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL)
- This link opens in a new window
A single source for e-reference for students, professionals, students, and general readers. More than 7,000 authoritative full-text titles are offered from Gale and Gale's publishing partners, addressing eighteen widely-studied subject areas. For more more information on Gale's publishing partners, go here

http://www.gale.cengage.com/servlet/GvrlFP?msg=ma
A Gale Cengage database | some titles provided by the AVL
Oxford Reference Online Premium
Oxford Reference Online brings together language and subject reference works from one of the world's biggest and most trusted reference publishers into a single cross-searchable resource. The Premium Collection offers a huge range of fully-indexed, extensively linked, up to date, and cross-searchable dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press, including detailed information across a broad subject range from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions series. The Premium Collection includes a superb range of Oxford titles, updated regularly with an expanding range of key titles in the acclaimed Oxford Companions and Oxford Dictionaries series, plus the Visual English Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and new heavily illustrated natural history titles such as the Encyclopedia of Mammals. This means a total of over 1.4 million entries, including longer, in-depth, signed entries with bibliographies.

Subscribers to the Premium Collection also benefit from excellent search functionality which makes it easy to choose between longer or shorter entries from subject reference titles, definitions from English or bilingual dictionaries, and quotations.

The Premium Collection is updated regularly with new titles, new editions, new entries, full-colour maps and illustrations, timelines, weblinks, and bibliographies.
Provided by the AVL and JSU

Selection of Reference Books

Reference books are of many types (bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers) and are used for various purposes and at different stages during the research process. Some academic disciplines, particularly those in the humanities, rely more heavily on reference books than do disciplines in the sciences or social sciences. Because of their connection to an academic discipline, these works are called specialized reference books. Their role and what they provide in research is different from what is done by electronic databases or circulating books that can be checked out. For student research, probably the most useful type of specialized reference book is the encyclopedia (or book under a different designation that still functions as an encyclopedia).

In research, reference books are useful to

obtain background information to get the broad view of a topic prior to beginning research
narrow the topic to a subject suitable for a research paper
learn about unfamiliar people, places, and things encountered further along in the research process
introduce researchers to more in-depth sources pertaining to the subject

Aside from assisting in research, these specialized reference encyclopedias also can

help students prepare for exams (especially comprehensive examinations for degrees)
provide students enough basic information to participate in class discussions
help teachers prepare lesson plans for things which will be covered in class but which are not a major part of the syllabus

Here is a selection of our reference books for American literature. Please use the Library JaxCat Catalog to find more reference books. [See the Important Journals box under the Find Articles tab for American Literary Scholarship.]

American Writers by Leonard Unger
Call Number: Ref PS129.A55
ISBN: 0684136627
Publication Date: 1977-02-01
Encyclopedia of American Poetry by Eric L. Haralson (Editor)
Call Number: Ref PS316.E53x 1998
ISBN: 1579580084
Publication Date: 1998-05-01
The Facts on File Companion to American Drama by Jackson R. Bryer; Mary C. Hartig
Call Number: Ref PS330.F33
ISBN: 9780816077489
Publication Date: 2010-04-01
The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel by Abby H. P. Werlock
Call Number: Ref PS371.F33 2006
ISBN: 0816045283
Publication Date: 2006-08-01
The Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story by Abby H. P. Werlock (Editor)
Call Number: Ref PS374.S5F33 2000
ISBN: 0816031649
Publication Date: 2000-02-01
The Oxford Companion to American Literature by James D. Hart; Phillip Leininger (Revised by)
Call Number: Ref PS21.H3 1995
ISBN: 0195065484
Publication Date: 1995-10-12