Content and Editorial Policy

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Literature Online Reference Edition is a dynamic collection of leading literary reference and criticism resources which offer essential support for academic study and research. It contains journals and reference works whose quality and value are recognized by the academic community, together with the MHRA's renowned and authoritative Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, and specially commissioned biographies which are updated and revised in line with current scholarship and developments.

Authors

Searches from the Search: Authors page draw on a database of authors and author information that grows with every monthly release of the service: currently, over 17,000 authors are included, of more than 100 different nationalities. Authors are selected and indexed by specialist researchers, who assign a range of index information to each author: a name authority file (derived from the Library of Congress catalogue name form, where available), dates of birth and death, gender, nationality, the literary periods with which the author is associated, and, where relevant, alternate name forms, literary movements and ethnicity. This allows users to search for authors and their works using the Advanced Search: Authors page.

Name forms: the form of the author's name that is displayed in browse lists and lists of results is taken from the Library of Congress name authority record, and often includes birth and death dates, e.g.: 'Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616'. We use Library of Congress name forms in order to have an authorized unique identifier for authors, and therefore always use the exact form as it appears in the Library of Congress authority files. Please note that in some cases these name forms may have missing date fields; for example, authors who have died may have a birth date but no death date. This is because the Library of Congress's policy is not to modify these name forms once they have become established in cataloguing (for further details, see http://www.loc.gov/help/contact-libarch-report.html#birth). As a result, we do not add death dates to these name forms; however, users can always find up-to-date information, including death dates and variant name forms, on the author's Author Page.

Coverage: our policy is to include authors writing in any language, and in a range of media and disciplines, who are relevant to scholars and students of literary studies. Any author from this category for whom Literature Online Reference Edition contains criticism or reference materials will be included in the database. This material could be a Literature Online biography, articles from reference works, or full-text journal articles that are subject-indexed under that author's name. Our editorial policy is therefore partly informed by the subject matter of current scholarship, since new authors that are being discussed in the latest issues of journals will be immediately added to the author database.

The breadth of authors covered by the resources in Literature Online Reference Edition reflect the broad and interdisciplinary nature of contemporary literary studies, encompassing:

Literary authors. This category is understood very broadly, with the aim of encompassing all authors who could be considered relevant to literary study and research: poets, playwrights, novelists (including genre fiction and children's authors), and selected authors of non-fiction works such as memoirs, essays, journalism and travel writing (examples include Margery Kempe, Primo Levi, Hunter S. Thompson, Frederick Douglass, Henry Mayhew and Isabella Bird).
Theorists and scholars whose work is studied in the context of literary and cultural studies. This includes literary and cultural theorists from Aristotle to Slavoj Zizek, plus feminist theorists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, social and political scientists and other relevant figures.
Filmmakers whose work is discussed in our library of full-text journals. This includes figures such as Jane Campion, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Ang Lee, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature 1920- (ABELL)

ABELL, which can be accessed via the Search: Criticism screen, contains 900,000 records covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world; unpublished doctoral dissertations are covered for the period 1920-1999. The bibliography consists of 80 volumes, beginning in 1920 and issued annually; a number of items published between 1892 and 1919 have been indexed retrospectively.

All aspects and periods of English literature are covered, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. British, American and Commonwealth writing are all represented. Coverage is international, including scholarly material in languages other than English.

ABELL is compiled under the auspices of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) by an international team of editors, contributors and academic advisors. It has been published in book form since 1920, and ProQuest publish the electronic version in both CD-ROM and web format. While the print volume and CD-ROM instalments are published annually, new bibliographic records are added to the monthly updates of Literature Online Reference Edition in advance of their appearance in the annual versions.

Bibliographic experts have long agreed that ABELL is an essential tool for the literary scholar, and have stressed its coverage of unique material that is not included in other bibliographic sources. In comparing ABELL with the MLA International Bibliography, Evan Ira Farber, Librarian Emeritus of Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, concluded that 'every comparative study of the two bibliographies shows that the overlap between them is surprisingly far from complete', and that 'every academic library supporting serious work - and certainly graduate work - in English or American literature should make both ABELL and MLAIB available to users'. This is supported by standard reference works such as Michael Marcuse's Reference Guide for English Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide, 2nd edn. (New York: MLA, 1993). Visit the MHRA website for more information on ABELL.

Testimonials on ABELL:

Laura Fuderer, Subject Librarian for English and French Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Until a few years ago I used to rely heavily on the MLAIB. I got to know ABELL better when I began contributing to it and realized its coverage of topics relating to literatures in English may be more extensive than MLAIB on at least three counts:

by covering periodicals from other disciplines it is more interdisciplinary (e.g. a lot of history journals and newsletters);
the periodicals include more single-author and society newsletters;
the editors stress book reviews, so there are more book citations than in MLAIB.

As a consequence I urge every student and scholar of English to use ABELL as well as MLAIB (which picks up dissertations), especially if they want to go all the way back to the 1920s online.

Evan Ira Farber, Librarian Emeritus of Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana:

It is very welcome news that Chadwyck-Healey is putting into electronic form the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. It is a reference tool I have long depended upon, and also one that I have seen too many reference librarians ignore or discount. This is unfortunate because that view is based on a misconception: they think that the MLA International Bibliography covers everything they could want in English or American literature. I trust that this misperception will soon be corrected now that ABELL is available in electronic form.

First, before 1956, the MLAIB, while covering both English and American literature and language, focused on scholarship published in America. ABELL's coverage was international from the start, so for those crucial decades of literary critical theory from 1920 through 1955, it is an unparalleled source for British and Continental criticism. Second, the journals covered by ABELL differ from those covered by MLAIB, particularly in the early years. Finally, ABELL also includes book reviews which are often sources of excellent critical commentary.

Aside from, and in addition to, those differences, is the fact that every comparative study of the two bibliographies shows that the overlap between them is surprisingly far from complete. One study, for example, showed that in one year the MLAIB had thirteen entries for Stephen Crane and ABELL had fifteen, but only three were identical!

There is no question in my mind that every academic library supporting serious work - and certainly graduate work - in English or American literature should make both ABELL and MLAIB available to users. As Michael Marcuse notes in his Reference Guide for English Studies (University of California Press, 1990): 'All current comparisons between the two bibliographies conclude by recommending that the scholar always consult both.' That advice is even sounder now that ABELL is available in electronic form.

323 Full-Text Journals

Literature Online Reference Edition contains a dynamic electronic library of academic journals from the field of literary and cultural studies. The full contents of each issue are included, and are fully searchable by keyword, phrase, author, subject and other data fields. In order to allow full searchability, including the display of hit markers, we allow users to view the ASCII text version of each article; however, in most cases the page image in PDF format is also available, so that users can view the article exactly as it appears in print form.

The Search: Criticism search page allows integrated searching of the full-text journals together with bibliographic records from ABELL. Articles and book reviews from journals are mapped to their corresponding ABELL records.

The library of journals grows with every monthly update of Literature Online Reference Edition, as we add current issues of existing journals. We also aim to continue identifying and licensing further titles that would be of interest to our users and adding them to the service. Our editorial policy is to include titles from the full range of literary and cultural studies, including critical theory, interdisciplinary studies, film studies, theatre studies, stylistics and pedagogy in addition to more traditional forms of literary scholarship. The journals collection also includes a number of titles that publish a high proportion of literary works by contemporary authors: in fact, with over 26,000 poems and short stories, by authors such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Joy Harjo, Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück, it forms one of the most comprehensive collections of contemporary literature available online.

See a list of journal titles currently available in Literature Online Reference Edition (in Excel format).

Reference Works

Literature Online Reference Edition contains electronic versions of the following print reference works; these can be searched individually or as a group from the Criticism & Reference search pages, and users can also browse the contents from Complete Contents:

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford University Press, 1990)
Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2005)
Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (Columbia University Press, 1995)
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998)
Encyclopedia of the Novel (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998)
New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 1993)
The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story (Columbia University Press, 2001)
The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (Columbia University Press, 1980)

Biographies

Literature Online Reference Edition includes biographical entries for over 4,500 authors. The majority of these are unique to Chadwyck-Healey Literature services. These biographies are either written by subject specialists working in the relevant academic field, or by our highly qualified in-house team of researchers, working to strict editorial guidelines, and are intended as a scholarly yet accessible introduction to a writer's life, works, context and critical reception. The service also contains biographies licensed from third-party publishers, including the H.W. Wilson Company Inc. and Debrett's People of Today. Our editorial team are continually working to add to our biography provision by commissioning new biographies and revising or updating existing material.

In 1999-2000, we undertook a major programme of biography creation for major authors from the medieval period to the present day. Under the guidance of six editors with responsibility for each literary period, over 300 new biographies were commissioned from experts in the field. These editors were:

Medieval Period: Alfred Hiatt BA (Sydney), PhD (Cantab), Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Renaissance Period: Hester Jones, Lecturer at University of Liverpool.
Restoration/Eighteenth Century: Clark Lawlor, post-doctoral Research Fellow at St. Anne's College and the European Humanities Research Centre, the University of Oxford.
Eighteenth Century/Romantic period: David Duff, BA, DPhil (York), Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen.
Nineteenth Century: Matthew Campbell, Lecturer in English at the University of Sheffield.
Twentieth Century: Ian Patterson, critic, poet, translator and Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.

Revision and additions to Literature Online biographies have been ongoing since this project was completed, and a full list of new biographers is available.

KnowledgeNotes^TM Student Guides

Literature Online Reference Edition includes the KnowledgeNotes student guides, a unique collection of critical introductions to major literary works. These high-quality academic resources are tailored to the needs of literature students and serve as a complement to the guidance provided by lecturers and seminar teachers.

As well as providing at-a-glance information, KnowledgeNotes guides also challenge students to be self-motivated and to read critically. Each guide has been written by a scholar with graduate-level expertise in the relevant area, working closely with the KnowledgeNotes team of specialist editors:

Managing Editor: Sarah Shute BA with Honors in Literature and Society (Brown), MFA in Fiction Writing (Brooklyn College)
Editor: Andrew Durkin BA with special honors in English (Drew), MA in English (Southern California), PhD candidate in English (Southern California)
Editor: Elizabeth M. Durst BA in Russian Languages and Literature and German (Northwestern), MA in Russian Literature (Southern California), PhD in Russian Literature and Culture (Southern California)
Editor: Carrie Pickett BA in Philosophy (Smith), MFA in English and Creative Writing (Mills), director of Manifest Press
Editor: Mary Beth Tegan BS (California State University at Chico), MA in English, Rhetoric and Composition (California State University at Northridge), PhD in English (Southern California)

Drawing on contemporary critical and theoretical approaches, the author provokes active engagement with the text by highlighting salient themes and suggesting areas for further enquiry. The specialist knowledge of our authors and editors means that students are guided through the text by a process that models the interpretive processes and explanatory methods of an experienced critical reader.

Each guide combines detailed analysis of a literary text with introductory and contextual material and suggestions for further reading. The range of texts covered reflects the full range of British, European and American literature studied as part of contemporary undergraduate courses, including the plays of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Tony Kushner, the poems of Chaucer, Poe and Eliot, the novels of Jane Austen, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, and the short stories of James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor and Sandra Cisneros.

Every KnowledgeNotes guide begins with an Overview, which places the text and author in context, lists the author's principal works and gives a breakdown of all the characters who appear in the text. This is followed by a Summary, which gives a synopsis of the Plot, a brief introduction to the text's Style and introduces the main Themes and Motifs. The Highlights section gives a detailed reading of the text, broken down into chapters, scenes or sections where applicable. Four learning devices are used to draw the reader's attention to significant points in the text: Take Home Points, which signal key elements in a passage, Exploration Points, which direct students towards areas of possible further study and research, Theme Alerts which identify passages relevant to the themes outlined in the Summary, and Quotables, which locate and interpret frequently-quoted passages. The guide ends with a selection of Works Consulted, which points users towards further reading and also serves as an example of correct scholarly citation.

New Essays on the American Novel

In addition to the full-text journals collection, Literature Online Reference Edition's Criticism resources include thirty-eight volumes of the Cambridge University Press series New Essays on the American Novel. Users can access these in a number of ways: via links from Author Pages to Criticism resources, by searching in Search: Criticism, where the essays are mapped to records from ABELL, or by browsing the contents of each volume from Complete Contents.

Bibliographies

Literature Online Reference Edition offers detailed bibliographies for over 1,500 major authors. Our editorial policy in compiling these bibliographies has been to record both literary and non-literary works, giving bibliographic details of the first publication of every work. Subsequent republications will not normally be included unless fundamental revisions have been undertaken. In cases where authors were voluminous contributors to newspapers, journals or periodicals, summary records of titles are given. Entries where the author performed the role of contributor, correspondent, editor or annotator are also recorded. Wherever possible, the most authoritative modern edition of the complete or selected works has also been indicated.

Web Sites

Literature Online Reference Edition provides searchable access to a database of sites relevant to literary studies. These are selected and indexed by specialist researchers working to strict editorial guidelines that ensure quality and relevance. In order to be selected for inclusion in our database, the sites have to offer more than simply a selection of e-texts or links to other resources; instead they will contain material such as criticism and other scholarly resources, background information and biographical details, or reviews and interviews. These resources are continually reviewed and expanded by a team dedicated to this task.

Though great care has been taken to select materials of the highest quality, links to third-party web sites are provided solely for informational purposes and as a convenience to our authorized users. ProQuest as publishers of Literature Online Reference Edition are not responsible for the content of the third-party web sites to which links have been provided. The links included in Literature Online Reference Edition do not constitute a referral or endorsement of any product or service advertised or distributed through the linked web sites, nor do they reflect any affiliation between ProQuest and the publishers of the third-party web site. Your use of the third-party web sites may be subject to the terms and conditions specified on the specific web sites you choose to visit.

Dictionaries

Every page within Literature Online Reference Edition features a dictionaries link, allowing access to electronic versions of the two foremost authorities on current usage of American and British English:

Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged: America's premier lexicographical work, first published in 1961, and including subsequent updates that take account of current usage.
Concise Oxford Dictionary: the foremost authority on current English, which for decades has been the most popular dictionary of its kind, selling throughout the English-speaking world. Using a radically more accessible style for this major new edition, Oxford lexicographers have rewritten every word and entry to represent the richness, complexity and beauty of the English language as never before. This tenth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary contains over 240,000 words, phrases and definitions covering current and historical English, as well as coverage of North American, South African, West Indian, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Scottish, Irish and Indian English.

Links to JSTOR

Subscribers to Literature Online Reference Edition who are also participants in JSTOR's Arts & Sciences I, II, III and IV collections, the Arts & Sciences Complement, and the Language & Literature collection can now follow links from bibliographic records in ABELL (The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) to the corresponding full-text articles in JSTOR. From the Criticism summary of results page, users can simply click on the icon to open JSTOR in a new browser window and read the requested article.

Please note that Literature Online Reference Edition only includes links to articles that have been included in ABELL. This means that, rather than offering links to the entire contents of the journal run offered by JSTOR, we only link to those articles which the editors of ABELL have identified as relevant to the study of English literature and language.

In order to activate the links, the librarian or systems administrator at your institution will need to access the Administration Page. The titles shown in the following spreadsheet currently have JSTOR links available.

Download JSTOR title list in Excel format