English 460: The Victorian Age
Bibliographies and General Guides To Research
Sources are listed in order by call number.
A Research Guide for Undergraduate Students: English and American Literature. Nancy L. Baker.
Ref. PR56 .B34 2000
Literary Research Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources in English Literary Studies. James L. Harner.
Ref. Z2011 .H34 2002
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature.
1939- .
Ref. Z 2011 .M69
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Introductory and Background Information
Sources are listed in order by call number.
The Oxford Companion to British History. John Cannon, ed.
Ref. DA34 .O93 1997
Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era. James Eli Adams, editor in chief; Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast, eds. 4 vols.
Ref. [q.] DA550 .E527 2004
Victorian Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary. Adam C. Roberts.
Ref. DA550 .R59 2003
Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia.
Ref. DA550 .V53 1988
The London Encyclopedia. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert,
eds.
Ref. DA679 .L78 1986
The Harper Handbook to Literature. Northrop Frye, Sheridan
Baker, George Perkins; with a chronology of literature and world events by
Barbara M. Perkins.
Ref. PN41 .F75 1985
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Michael
Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds.
Ref. PN81 .J554 2005
The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Margaret Drabble, ed.
Ref. PR19 .D73 1985
The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. 2 vols.
Ref. [q.] Z2011 .O98 2002
Online:
Britannica Online
The electronic version of the classic reference work. You can either search for terms or browse the alphabetical list of entries. View the entries from the Encyclopaedia Britannica rather than the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, as the latter is written for elementary and high school students.
Literature Resource Center.
Use the Author search or the Advanced search. The title search doesn't always find everything you might want to see. In addition to biographical information, includes material from Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism and more.
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Biographical Information
Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen and Sidney
Lee, eds. 22 vols. plus decennial supplements.
The essays in this dictionary are about deceased persons of
British or Irish origins who played major roles in British
history. Bibliographies are included in many of the entries. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the online version of the DNB, and provides multiple search options for nearly 50,000 biographies.
DA 28 .D4
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
To find biographical books about a certain person, search in LUCIA, for the person using Subject begins with. Browse through the subject headings to find the subheading which corresponds to your specific interests. Be alert when searching non-western names or names of rulers, as you may need to use varying forms of these names. Many times, LUCIA has cross-references for these.
For autobiographical books by and about a certain person, search in LUCIA for persons as Author. Be sure to consult the library's guide on Biographical Information for further ideas and information.
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Finding Books
To find items owned by the library, search LUCIA. Try a Subject begins with search, for example, english literature--19th century or realism. LUCIA will list other subject headings (and subheadings) which may be of interest. LUCIA will also suggest related terms which can also be searched. For advanced research you should consult the Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH, a multi-volume guide to the terms commonly used in catalogs like ours. The LCSH can be found on top of the Ready Reference shelves behind the reference desk on the first floor of the library.
To combine terms for a different kind of search, try Keyword Anywhere. LUCIA will look for the terms you specify anywhere in the important areas of the cataloging records, and display a list of those records. Try a search for a phrase, like great expectations, by searching with quotation marks around the phrase, as in "great expectations". You can search for individual terms connected by logical operators like AND or OR. You might want to try searching for some of the terms you find in the LCSH. You can also search for multiple forms of words by using an asterisk. Try a search like dickens and (family or domestic*). The asterisk acts as a truncation symbol and tells LUCIA to search for all words starting with domestic: domestics, domesticity, and so on. The connecting operator and then tells LUCIA to display all the records containing both the term dickens and either the term family or any variation of the terms that start with domestic. You can target your search even more effectively by telling LUCIA to look for the terms in the subject area of the records; compare the Keyword Anywhere search with the Subject Keyword search. With the Guided Search you can combine Keyword Anywhere searches with Subject Keyword searches.
Books are arranged on the library's shelves by Library of Congress Classification. This is a system which organizes materials by general subjects. Once you have a call number from searching LUCIA, see this guide to call number locations at Mudd and the library floor maps to find out where a book might be on the shelves.
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Finding Articles
The best index to use will depend on your topic. Be sure to check the Electronic Resources page for other options. Some of our indexes include:
MLA International Bibliography. 1963-
A leading source for the field of literary studies. Wide ranging index to just about anything of a scholarly nature related to literature and language.
EBSCOhost.
Follow the link for EBSCOhost Web. EBSCOhost provides a single Web source for multiple databases; you might want to select the Academic Search Elite. Contains broad and specialized coverage of academic and general periodicals.
Academic OneFile
A one-stop source for news and periodical articles on a wide range of topics. Includes full-text articles, many with images. 1980 - present; updated daily.
Historical Abstracts.
The essential index to the scholarly literature of world history, in
books and proceedings as well as journals. Include short summaries of the works indexed.
Historical Abstracts includes citations of articles on African, Asian,
Latin American and European history.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index
A citation index to articles in the arts and humanities. Citation indexes allow you to trace the number of times a particular source has been cited. Covers 1980 to the present.
Once you have a citation for an article on your topic, try the 
button to see if that particular article is available. If you don't find it, look in LUCIA for the title of the journal or newspaper to see if the library owns it. You should also search
BESS, an
automated search of the library's full text databases, for electronic copies of articles.
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Journals
Some journals of interest:
Dickens Studies Annual. v. 20- . PR4579 .D49
Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1949-1986 (online)
Nineteenth-Century Literature. 1986-1999 (online}; 1999- (paper)
Victorian Literature and Culture. 1998-1999 (paper); 1999- (online)
Victorian Studies. 1957-1999 (paper); 2000- (online)
Finding out about journals
Magazines for Libraries. 12th ed.
Reviews of magazines and journals. Magazines for Libraries is organized by broad subject area, so it's usually quicker to use the title index.
Ref. Z6941 q.M23 2003
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory
Thorough information about periodicals, including publisher information and reviews.
Nineteenth century British periodicals:
Blackwood's Magazine. 1817-1910. Also available through the Internet Library of Early Journals
Edinburgh Review. 1802-1929
Notes and Queries. Part of the Internet Library of Early Journals from the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford.
Punch. 1858-1992
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900. 3 vols.
Contains the tables of contents for each issue of eight major Victorian periodicals, and identifies the anonymous authors.
Ref. Z2005 .H6
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Web Resources
Internet Resources for English
Selected by the librarians here at Lawrence.
Internet Resources for Gender Studies
Another list of sources selected by the librarians.
Voice of the Shuttle
One of the leading web pages for research in the humanities.
Of course, there are many more web resources available that might be useful in your research. You might want to try looking at sources that select the best of the Web, like these:
It's important to think carefully about any information you find in any format, and to evaluate resources for their accuracy, applicability, and so forth. Evaluation of web resources is especially important. You may want to consult this guide to Evaluating Internet Resources, or the library's Web Wise Guide to Searching. You can often learn a lot about a page (and a site) by parsing the URL.Top
Style Manuals
Academic Citation and Writing
Style manuals of the humanities, physical sciences, and the social sciences in the Seeley G. Mudd Library.
Citing Electronic Documents
This page provides guidance on citing electronic documents and links to other guides, some on specific styles of documentation.
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.
The guide for any academic papers written in the literatures and languages.
RRef. LB2369 .G53 2003
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About Research on the Victorian Age
While you will find material on your topic in resources for English literary studies, you may also want to consider searching for material from other fields, like history, gender studies, history of philosophy, and more. In addition to consulting catalogs and indexes, be sure to look at bibliographies supplied at the end of relevant articles, chapters, and books, and to search library catalogs for book-length bibliographies.
Remember that in any written work you produce your sources must be fully documented. It may help to look at the information on style before you start your research, so that you will have all the details required for documentation at hand when you need them. Then as you write, go back to the resources on style for details on the exact format of your citations.
Evaluating the resources you find is an essential part of the research process. See this guide to hints on evaluation of books and articles and this guide to evaluating Internet resources.
If you need help, be sure to ask a Reference Librarian
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Definitions of terms and abbreviations:
Ref. = Reference collection, first floor
RRef.= Ready reference, shelves behind the reference desk
Periodicals = Level A
Reference Indexes = Alphabetically arranged at the end of the reference collection
q. = Oversized books: interfiled in reference and M class scores; at end of classes in other collections
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