LibGuides: ENGL 495: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group: Literary Criticism

What is Literary Criticism?

Literary criticism is the term given to studies that define, classify, analyze, interpret, and evaluate works of literature.

There are many types of literary criticism: some examples include historical criticism, textual criticism, feminist criticism, and formalist criticism.

Literary criticism may examine a particular literary work or it may look at an author's writings as a whole.

Finding Literary Criticism

Many of the resources you find in our literature databases will fall under the heading of 'literary criticism.' See below for these databases.

To specifically find literary criticism, search your author or the title of the work(s) you are researching in addition to:

literary criticism
literary theory
specific theories, such as feminism

MLA International Bibliography
“Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains millions of citations from journals and series, as well as book publishers. MLA International Bibliography covers literature, language and linguistics, folklore, film, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. In addition to the bibliography, the database includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals, the association's proprietary thesaurus used to assign descriptors to each record in the bibliography." (EBSCOhost, 2019).
JSTOR Collections
“JSTOR includes journal content, primary sources, images, and more across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences,” (JSTOR, 2011). Although most content found here is full-text, researchers may also find links to articles that are not available online through Morningside College. The HJF Library provides access through JSTOR to 15 Arts & Sciences Collections and 1 Life Science Collection.

Research Challenges

It can be difficult to find literary criticism. Here are some things that can be challenging when researching literature:

There are generally fewer articles on contemporary authors
There are generally fewer articles on women and minority authors
Some works just do not have a lot written on them

In these cases, you may need to be more creative when searching for sources. You can:

Try WorldCat Interlibrary Loan. You can then search beyond what our library has and see what other libraries worldwide have in their holdings. You can always put in an interlibrary loan request to access these items.
Try researching close topics. For example, if you cannot find resources on a particular text, do research on the author's other works; or, do research in general on the literary theory you have chosen and apply it to the text you are reading.
Talk to a librarian. We are here to help you with your research! Don't feel you have to struggle for too long before talking with us.