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Online Literary Criticism Guide

Good literary criticism can be one of the hardest kinds of information to find on the Internet. Although there are many sources of online author information, it can often be difficult to find authoritative and critical works.

To help you find the best information, we've collected and described some of the best starting places for finding online critical writing. This resource is particularly good for finding information on English-language authors, but also includes many authors whose works have been translated into English.

If you find good guides to critical sites that we have missed, please let us know by emailing us at crit-url@ipl.org.

Best Starting Places | Other Useful Starting Places | Starting Places for Particular Time Periods

Best Starting Places

Atlantic Monthly Magazine search
http://www.theatlantic.com/search/
The Atlantic Monthly Magazine provides critical reviews of influential books; their website contains reviews dating back to the 19th century to show how authors were received by their contemporaries. Use their search engine to find old articles about your author.

Literary Resources on the Net
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/
This is a searchable and comprehensive guide to author information with more critical links than most other sites.

Internet Public Library Online Literary Criticism Collection
http://www.ipl.org/ref/litcrit/
The Online Literary Criticism Collection brings together hundreds of critical and biographical sites with annotations. It is international in scope, but emphasizes authors from North America, the British Isles, and the former British Empire. The collection is arraged by author, title, and nationality/literary period.

Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research
http://vos.ucsb.edu/
The Voice of the Shuttle is a very comprehensive index to online information about authors, but there is little actual criticism mixed in among the online texts and links to other information about the authors. Despite this limitation it is a very useful starting place, especially since much of the criticism is labelled as such. Sections of the site which may prove particularly useful include:

Other Useful Starting Places

A Celebration of Women Writers
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mmbt/www/women/celebration.html
"The Celebration provides a comprehensive listing of links to biographical and bibliographical information about women writers, and complete published books written by women." Includes women writers from antiquity to the present, with an excellent selection of current authors worldwide. Organized by name, century, and country. The amount of criticism varies greatly among authors.

Literature and Medicine
http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/literature.html
This database contains commentary on literature that deals with medical and psychological issues. While this may sound like a peculiar topic, it does contain good criticism on a wider range of topics than you might imagine.

LitLinks
http://www.smpcollege.com/litlinks/home.htm
LitLinks has biographies and short lists of links to authors in five literary genres: fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and critical theory. It also categorizes some good sites on literary periods from medieval through contemporary. A good starting point.

PAL: Perspectives in American Literature: A Research and Reference Guide
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/TABLE.HTML
This detailed website is a guide to finding literary criticism and commentary about American authors. It is arranged by literary periods, and includes introductions and general bibliographies for each period.

Prose and Verse Criticism of Poetry
http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/indexcriticism.html
This site links to many works of criticism in the form of poetry. Arranged by the name of the author being critiqued, this is a good place to find poems about pre-20th century authors, including some classical Roman and Greek writers.

Voices from the Gaps Women Writers of Color
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/
"An instructional World Wide Web site focusing on the lives and works of women writers of color." This is an excellent source for biographical information as well as bibliographies about North American women writers of many ethnic backgrounds. Some of the entries contain links to sites with critical articles.

Good Starting Places for Specific Time Periods
(in approximately chronological order)

Exploring Ancient World Cultures Essay Index
http://eawc.evansville.edu/essays/
This index contains scholarly articles on ancient and medieval world cultures including the Near East, India, China, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Early Islam, and Medieval Europe. Many of the articles contain literary criticism.

Luminarium
http://www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm
This site offers biographical and critical essays on a range of authors from Medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth century Europe. The essays themselves are written by a variety of people, many of whom are scholars in their field. The amount of documentation (bibliographies, footnotes, etc.) varies between essays.

Labyrinth: A World-Wide Web Server for Medieval Studies
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/labyrinth-home.html
Developed at Georgetown University, this site is a huge collection of resources about the Middle Ages and late antiquity, designed primarily for professors but useful for students as well. For example, if you search "Chaucer" on the site, you will get links to much useful information about Chaucer's life and works, particularly the Canterbury Tales.

Early Modern Literary Studies
http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlshome.html
This is a good academic journal available in full text on the Internet. "Articles in EMLS examine English literature, literary culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; responses to published papers are also published as part of a Readers' Forum. Reviews evaluate recent work as well as academic tools of interest to scholars in the field." The journal also evaluates useful web sites.

The Gothic: Materials for Study
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/Group/title.html
"The text of the project is divided into five sections, and each has an introductory page that can be accessed from the title page. Each section is then broken down into subtopics that include excerpts from both primary and secondary (critical) texts."

Romantic Circles
http://www.rc.umd.edu/hpfiles/index1.html
"This site is devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture. Romantic Circles is the collaborative product of an ever-expanding community of editors, contributors, and users around the world."

Romanticism on the Net
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385
"Romanticism On the Net is a peer-reviewed electronic journal devoted to Romantic studies." Includes articles, book reviews, and many recommended web sites.

Victorian Literature Overview
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/vn/litov.html
The site includes a timeline, authors, discussion of the literary canon, literary techniques, genres and modes, Victorian serials, and literary convergences. It is part of a larger site, The Victorian Web, http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/victov.html.

An Index of Websites on Modernism
http://www.modcult.brown.edu/people/Scholes/modlist/Title.html
"This site offers "annotated references to web pages and gopher files on artists, poets, novelists, musicians, critics, and philosophers who wrote, created, and composed in the first half of the twentieth century." Many authors are included. Critical sites are helpfully labelled as such, and separated from sites which are informational or contain only online texts. There are also some general modernism resources listed.

Bohemian Ink
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/
"An online review of the history and future of experimental literature and poetry," including sections on beat, modern, indie, historical, and global literature, almost exclusively 20th century. Contains links to biographical information and some critical sources.

The Libyrinth
http://www.libyrinth.com/
A web site which provides biographical and critical essays, bibliographies, and links relating to experimental twentieth century authors, such as Pynchon, Kafka, and Joyce.

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Last Updated Mar 9, 2000