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English Research Guide: Find Books

Literary Criticism in Books

Books are a good source of literary criticism and biographical information. You will find this material in two forms:an entire book about one author or even one major work. 

For example, a scholar may have written an entire book on one of Shakespeare's plays or one of Hemingway's novels.

To find these, do a book search, using the author's name or the name of the work as a subject.

Or, there might be a book of collected essays about the author or the work.  For example, there might be a book of critical essays on the works of Toni Morrison or a book of articles on Shakespeare's tragedies.

To find these, enter the author's name as a subject and the word criticism as another subject term.

The "advanced" search mode in any of the library catalog gives you two or more subject lines to enter your search terms.

Find books

Find books on a particular topic using Primo, the SU Libraries library catalog. Primo lists books, journals, videos, audio, manuscripts, and Internet resources owned or licensed by SU Libraries. 

Ebooks

Access thousands of full-text electronic book titles via Ebsco's eBooks Collection. Other full-text electronic books are available through the library catalog.