Theory, Etymology, Encyclopedias
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism
An indispensable resource for scholars and students of literary theory and discourse. Compiled by 275 specialists from around the world, the Guide presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements and is updated annually.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The OED has been "the last word on words for over a century" -- the authoritative source on the English language.
It provides you with the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.
As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.
In the OED, You can find out when and where words are known to have first appeared, when they changed meanings, when some meanings became obsolete, when words disappeared entirely from usage.
Oxford Reference Online
A collection of several hundred digitized texts, some aimed to give you brief and succinct information. Many others provide in-depth, specialized, subject overviews.
Consider this database an excellent, academically authoritative answer to the more general, everyday information needs that Wikipedia supplies. Look here for explanations of people, events, concepts, theories, timelines, quotations, definitions, and more.
