Guides: ENG 380 The American Novel: Home

Locate Biographical Information

American National Biography
Access to portraits of more than 18,700 men and women, updated quarterly with new and revised entries, features thousands of illustrations, more than 80,000 hyperlinked cross-references, links to select web sites, and powerful search capabilities. Includes over 900 articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History, providing historical and social context to the biographies.
Biography in Context
Provides biographical information on more than 528,000 people throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. The database also provides full-text articles from over 350 magazines and newspapers and includes more than 27,000 images plus links to Web sites tied to the lives and works of the subjects.

Some 50,000 new and/or updated biographies are added each year, as well as daily status updates of existing subjects

Online Reference

Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Literature
Covers American authors from many periods and genres, building a broad understanding of the various contexts - from the biographical to the literary to the historical - in which literature can be viewed.

Literature Specific Databases

Literature Resource Center
Provides up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on more than 145,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.
MLA International Bibliography
An index of journal articles, books, and dissertations, the electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains over 2.5 million citations from more than 5,000 journals and series and 1,200 book publishers. Coverage is international and subjects include literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing.

In addition, The MLA Directory of Periodicals and the association's proprietary thesaurus used to assign descriptors to each record in the Bibliography are included.

Multidisciplinary Databases

These multidisciplinary databases may be useful in your research.

JSTOR
Used by millions for research, teaching, and learning. With more than a thousand academic journals and over 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources, JSTOR is one of the world's most trusted sources for academic content.

Project MUSE
Project MUSE offers full-text current and archival articles from 600+ scholarly journals from major university presses covering literature and criticism, history, performing arts, cultural studies, education, philosophy, political science, gender studies, and more. Updated continually.
Academic Search Complete
Provides full text coverage to nearly 9,100 journals, including over 7,900 peer-reviewed titles in the social sciences, humanities, general science, multi-cultural studies, education and more. Full-text coverage dates back to 1985 and is updated daily.

Course Description

English 380, the American novel, focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century novels: Old Man & the Sea, Woman Warrior, O Pioneers!, The Color Purple, and Moby-Dick, . We will practice close interpretive reading, writing, and research skills necessary for the study of literature. Our study of the novel will serve as a context for considering historical and contemporary issues related to the assigned texts, particularly homosocial communit(y)ies, race, the social construction of gender, ethnicity, and class.