Library Research Guides: Comparative Literature: Databases by Topic

Databases by Topic

Reference

Literature Resource Center
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Biographies, bibliographies, and critical analysis of authors from all time periods in many genres. Search by author, title, genre, literary movement or literary themes.
Covers more than 124,000 writers and includes more than 11,700 academic essays on the authors and their works.
MagillOnLiterature Plus
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Editorially reviewed critical analyses, character studies, author biographies, and brief plot summaries of popular works of literature.
Search by genre, title, author, subject., age level, characters.

Contains Masterplots (12 volumes), Masterplots II (58 volumes), Cyclopedia of World Authors (5 volumes), Cyclopedia of Literary Characters (5 volumes), Magill's Literary Annual 1977-2012 (38 volumes), Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (4 volumes), Magill Book Reviews, and Critical Surveys (35 volumes).
Chicago Manual of Style Online
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The online version of the classic guide to documentary style. Access is for the 16th and 17th editions.
Includes the complete, fully searchable text of the traditional print version of The Chicago Manual of Style. Also includes access to the Chicago Style Q&A, which is another fully searchable resource of questions and answers, and the Tools, which provides examples of forms, letters, and style sheets.
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
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Survey of figures, schools, and movements in literary criticism.
Includes more than 300 alphabetically arranged entries and subentries on critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.
Short Story Index (H.W. Wilson)
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An index to finding short stories that have been published in anthologies, collections, and periodical literature. Includes links to some full text.
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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Comprehensive resource for the study of philosophy. Includes access to over 2,800 articles and 25,000 cross-references linking themes, concepts and philosophers. Also a reference source for those in subjects related to philosophy, such as politics, psychology, economics, anthropology, religion and literature.

Indexes & Databases

MLA International Bibliography
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The MLA Bibliography indexes material in modern languages, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film.
It contains references to scholarly research from journals and series, monographs, chapters of books, working papers, dissertations, proceedings, Festschriften and bibliographies.
Bibliography of Asian Studies
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Western-language bibliographical database for research on East, Southeast and South Asia. Published by the Association for Asian Studies, it covers all subjects with special focus on the humanities and social sciences.
Includes over 900,000 citations, dating primarily from 1971 onwards, with more than 400,000 citations since 1992. All entries are searchable by author, title, year of publication, place of publication, language of publication, journal title, country, subject, keyword, ISSN and ISBN. Includes the full content of the printed volumes of the annual Bibliography of Asian Studies dating back to 1971.
Periodicals Index Online
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Index to millions of articles published in over 6,000 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. Encompasses three centuries of scholarly publication in over 60 languages and dialects, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Western languages.
Bibliographic information can be searched separately for every journal indexed in PIO. In addition, researchers can access a list of issues for each journal and a table of contents for each issue.
Essay and General Literature Index
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Indexes essays and miscellaneous works from printed anthologies and collections.
Topics of the essays cover a broad range of humanities and social sciences, including literary works, drama, and film. Essays are English-language, published in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. Approximately 340 single and multi-authored volumes are indexed annually.
Short Story Index (H.W. Wilson)
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An index to finding short stories that have been published in anthologies, collections, and periodical literature. Includes links to some full text.
Victorian Popular Culture
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Popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe during the years from 1779 to 1930.
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
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Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature is a bibliography compiled by the Modern Humanities Research Association. ABELL lists monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations.
Contains more than 1 million records, from 1892 through to today with regular monthly updates. It indexes more than 850 journals and is a resource for literary criticism published between 1892-1962.
Alternative Press Index Archive
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Alternative Press Index Archive offers both international and interdisciplinary coverage of a variety of alternative sources, indexing information on topics of cultural, economic, political and social change.
Focus is on the practice and theory of socialism, national liberation, labor, Indigenous peoples, LGBT, feminism, ecology, democracy, and anarchism.
ARTstor
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PLEASE NOTE: the Artstor platform is being retired and will no longer be available as of August 1, 2024. Content has already migrated to Artstor on JSTOR. Existing individual Artstor user accounts will carry over to the new JSTOR platform. A digital image library of over 2.5 million digital images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. To save or download images, users must register for an individual account.
Users who create an account also gain access to a set of tools for sharing images, curating groups of images, downloading them directly into PowerPoint presentations, and comparing and contrasting images.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index
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Search citations from arts and humanities journals published from 1975 to the present.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It fully covers 1,160 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals. A special feature is cited reference searching, which allows the researcher to search citation data (the footnotes to individual articles), taking a known paper and finding others which cite it or finding all papers citing work by a specific author.
This index is included in the Web of Science and covers from 1975 to the present.
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online
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Provides annotated entries for scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced from 1960 onward. The scope is international. Updated regularly.
This release of The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare. The scope is international, with coverage extending to more than 92 languages and representing every country in North America, South America, and Europe, and nearly every country in Asia, Africa, and Australia. The more than 133,000 records in this version cite several hundred thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings.
International Medieval Bibliography
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The IMB indexes articles in journals, conference proceedings, collections of essays and Festschriften. Indexing includes materials worldwide in a variety of languages.
The International Medieval Bibliography covers of the European Middle Ages, including the Middle East and North Africa, in the period 400-1500. Items in the bibliography are taken from some 4500 periodicals and 5000 miscellany volume (conference proceedings, essay collections, Festschriften and exhibition catalogues). Entries include full bibliographical details and subject classifications.
WorldCat
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Thousands of libraries may be searched from this one catalog; Interlibrary Loan requests can also be made.
Literature Compass
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Peer-reviewed survey articles covering a broad range of topics in literary scholarship.
The database works much like a journal, is updated regularly, and offers multiple and differing viewpoints on key issues within the field. It also includes citations and abstracts for some of the major journals within the field. The database is searchable and browseable by time period, and all time periods are included.

Online Texts

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction
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A comprehensive online collection of prose, theatre, and poetry written by authors of Hispanic background working in the U.S. Includes text, pictures, and performance materials.
Includes more than 100,000 pages pages of poetry, fiction, and over 450 plays written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino authors working in the United States. The vast majority of the materials are from the Chicano Renaissance to the present. Includes nearly 800 items (poems, novels, and plays) that have never been published before. Researchers will also find numerous Chicano folk tales and audio files of selected poems and plays.
Early American Fiction 1789 - 1875
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An enhancement of Early American Fiction 1789-1850, this database includes its predecessor and over 300 additional first editions of major fiction titles from the late 18th century to 1875.
The full-text of each work is available and searchable, and page images of the original editions are included. Includes novels and short stories by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, as well as a host of minor writers of the period.
Women Writers Online
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Contains approximately 200 texts written by women in English from 1400-1850.
Twentieth Century North American Drama
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Full text of more than 2,000 plays, including all types of U.S. and Canadian dramas.
Contains 2,059 plays by 434 North American playwrights, written from the late 1800s. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays. Also includes detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Eight Centuries
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Database covering source material dating from 1106 until 1960, aggregating indexes, catalogs, collections, and other finding aids.
Eight Centuries (formerly 19th Century Masterfile) is a database covering source material dating from 1106 until 1960 (varies by source). 8C aggregates indexes, catalogs, collections, and other finding aids, and includes citations to 9,000 periodicals in 30+ languages. 8C provides access to articles, newspapers, books, U.S. patents, government documents, and images. Links to open access and subscription full-text sources are included where available.
Early English Prose Fiction
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Contains 211 works in English prose by writers from the British Isles from the period 1500-1700.
Black Drama
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Full text access to more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Includes detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
Black Thought and Culture
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Collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.
The collection includes the words of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Sammy Davis, Jr., Ida B. Wells, Nikki Giovanni, Mary McLeod Bethune, Carl Rowan, Roy Wilkens, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Constance Baker Motley, Walter F. White, Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, Bobby Seale, Gwendolyn Brooks, Huey P. Newton, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Randall Kennedy, Cornel West, Nelson George, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and hundreds of other notable people.
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
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A digital archive of American historical newspapers from the 19th century, including over 1.5 million full-text pages, many complete with images.
Early English Books Online
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This database offers complete citation information and page images from every book published in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the United States between 1475-1700.
English Drama
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More than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century.
Google Books Search
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A tool produced by the Google search engine that searches the contents of books that they have scanned.
Public domain and out of copyright books are readily available through Google Books, in downloadable, PDF format. Items still under copyright may not be entirely viewed, nor may they be printed or copied. Books may be in full view, limited preview, spippet view, or no preview available.
South and Southeast Asian Literature in English
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Includes fiction, short fiction, essays, interviews, and manuscript materials written in English from authors originating in South and Southeast Asia.
Works were written from the end of the colonial era to the present. The writers are from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Fiji, either by birth or through cultural identity. Writers may now be living in the Caribbean or Africa, London, Toronto, or New York.
Yiddish Literature
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About 800 valuable Yiddish books, printed in Hebrew letters, from the Frankfurt University Library.
The texts were printed in Hebrew letters in West, Central and East Europe. The dates range from the middle of the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The collection contains the whole spectrum of Yiddish texts, including a large number of women's bibles (Tse'na Re'ena), liturgy, medical guide books, science and education, works on religious customs (Minhagim), legends, historical chronicles and translations of well known tales like "A Thousand and one Nights".
Latin American Women Writers
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Prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America.
Latin American Women Writers is an extensive searchable collection of prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Also included are essays by Latin American feminists and revolutionaries, who address both the universal concerns of women in every age and the distinctive issues of their struggles in the region.
Caribbean Literature
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Fiction, poetry, manuscripts, archival content, interviews, photographs and other formats, representing writers from the entire Caribbean region.
Materials are from the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes numerous rare and hard-to-find works written in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages.
Black Women Writers
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Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, Black women needed to create their own identities and movements. The collection documents that effort, presenting the woman’s perspective on the diversity and development of Black people generally, and in particular the works document the evolution of Black feminism.
Black Women Writers includes fiction, poetry, and essays. Among the authors are Nikki Giovanni, Maryse Condé, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Rhoda Reddock, Margaret Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rosa Guy, Sonia Sanchez, Olive Senior, and Barbara Ransby. Works are in their original languages, although an English translation executed by the original author may be available. Works are reproduced in their entirety and when possible, an image of the original page accompanies the text. The dates of the material range from the 1700s to contemporary pieces.

Theory & Criticism

Arts & Humanities Citation Index
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Search citations from arts and humanities journals published from 1975 to the present.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It fully covers 1,160 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals. A special feature is cited reference searching, which allows the researcher to search citation data (the footnotes to individual articles), taking a known paper and finding others which cite it or finding all papers citing work by a specific author.
This index is included in the Web of Science and covers from 1975 to the present.
MLA International Bibliography
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The MLA Bibliography indexes material in modern languages, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film.
It contains references to scholarly research from journals and series, monographs, chapters of books, working papers, dissertations, proceedings, Festschriften and bibliographies.
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
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Survey of figures, schools, and movements in literary criticism.
Includes more than 300 alphabetically arranged entries and subentries on critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods.
MagillOnLiterature Plus
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Editorially reviewed critical analyses, character studies, author biographies, and brief plot summaries of popular works of literature.
Search by genre, title, author, subject., age level, characters.

Contains Masterplots (12 volumes), Masterplots II (58 volumes), Cyclopedia of World Authors (5 volumes), Cyclopedia of Literary Characters (5 volumes), Magill's Literary Annual 1977-2012 (38 volumes), Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (4 volumes), Magill Book Reviews, and Critical Surveys (35 volumes).
Project Muse
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Provides full text access and indexing for e-journals and e-books from a variety of scholarly publishers. Covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
Academic Search (EBSCO)
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Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.
This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
Gale Literature Criticism
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Online compilation of the Gale literary criticism series.
The 10 individual, award-winning Gale series that comprise Literature Criticism Online represent a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres.

Titles include:
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
Shakespearean Criticism
Literature Criticism from 1400-1800
Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism
Poetry Criticism
Short Story Criticism
Drama Criticism
Children's Literature Review
Literature Resource Center
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Biographies, bibliographies, and critical analysis of authors from all time periods in many genres. Search by author, title, genre, literary movement or literary themes.
Covers more than 124,000 writers and includes more than 11,700 academic essays on the authors and their works.
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
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Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature is a bibliography compiled by the Modern Humanities Research Association. ABELL lists monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations.
Contains more than 1 million records, from 1892 through to today with regular monthly updates. It indexes more than 850 journals and is a resource for literary criticism published between 1892-1962.
JSTOR
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Provides searchable full-text of historical runs of important scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, sciences, ecology, and business.
JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization established with the assistance of The Mellon Foundation, provides complete runs of hundreds of important journal titles in more than 30 arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. These scholarly journals can be browsed online and searched, and the page images can be printed for those available in full-text. The IUB Libraries subscribe to current content for only some titles available through JSTOR.

All journals in JSTOR start with the first volume. Many include content up to a "moving wall" of 3-5 years ago, although some journals have a fixed ending date for their content in JSTOR. Please check individual journals for exact dates of coverage.

For information about access to this resource for IU alumni, contact the Indiana University Alumni Association.
WorldCat
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Thousands of libraries may be searched from this one catalog; Interlibrary Loan requests can also be made.
Literature Compass
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Peer-reviewed survey articles covering a broad range of topics in literary scholarship.
The database works much like a journal, is updated regularly, and offers multiple and differing viewpoints on key issues within the field. It also includes citations and abstracts for some of the major journals within the field. The database is searchable and browseable by time period, and all time periods are included.

Comparative Literature

Databases by Topic

Reference

Indexes & Databases

Online Texts

Theory & Criticism

Featured Databases

IU Libraries

Comparative Literature

Databases by Topic

Reference

Indexes & Databases

Online Texts

Theory & Criticism

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Additional resources

Featured Databases

IU Libraries