English and American Literature and Language: Resources for Graduate Students

General and literary research in Widener Library's Loker Reading Room, Child Memorial Library, and online

The Loker Reading Room in Widener houses the core print reference collection for literary studies. There is also a significant number of reference titles in the stacks of Widener and in the Harvard Depository. Use HOLLIS Classic catalog to search for them. Child Library the departmental library of the English Department, also offers a useful smaller set of reference sources and texts in a non-circulating collection. There are many subject encyclopedias and and language and subject dictionaries in Loker Reading Room. To find electronic resources beyond those listed below, use E-Research.

Use E-Research to identify useful reference sources. Select the Subject tab in Find E-Resources, and you will be able to browse through resources in all of the disciplines, or search for General Reference sources on-line.

Oxford English Dictionary

The Encyclopaedia Britannica : a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature and general information. 11th ed. Cambridge, England., 1910-1922.

Oxford Reference Online Premium Collection Contains dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. It is a fully-indexed, cross-searchable database of these books. A broad subject range from titles in the Oxford Companions Series is available, as are other standard sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, dictionaries of African, Asian, Celtic and other mythologies,etc.

New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
This is an excellent resource for literary studies, generally, and particularly powerful for the study of all aspect of poetry.

Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Includes definitions of terms relating to criticism and theory in literature, film, linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, feminist studies, media studies, and related areas. Major concepts and schools of thought are represented in longer essays.

Middle English Compendium Includes three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources.

Old English Corpus The Old English machine-readable corpus is a complete record of surviving Old English except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts. This edition of the Corpus has been constructed from a version supplied by the Dictionary of Old English project in 1998.