Select a Database
Library Databases by Subject: Literature
| Database/Description | Guide |
|---|---|
| Academic Search Elite An EBSCO database that provides full text coverage of over 2,050 journals, including nearly 1,500 peer-reviewed titles in the social sciences, humanities, general science, multi-cultural studies, education and more. Full-text coverage back to 1985. |  |
| AFI Catalog Compiled by the American Film Institute, this national filmography documents around 46,000 American feature films from 1893-1970, providing full production and cast information as well as extensive plot summaries and notes. | |
| American National Biography Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life -- whose lives have shaped the nation. Updated quarterly with hundreds of new and revised entries, the ANB Online 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. | |
| Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature contains 880,000 records, covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards. | |
| Biography Resource Center Provides biographical information on more than 340,000 people from throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. Besides biographical narratives, the database provides full-text articles from more than 300 periodicals and includes more than 26,000 images. | |
| Black Thought and Culture Black Thought and Culture provides approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to the present. In addition to well-known works, when completed, the collection will feature unique, fugitive and never-before-published materials, including the first-ever complete full run of the Black Panther newspaper. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art. This ninth release of Black Thought and Culture includes approximately 1297 sources and 1100 authors (March 2007). | |
| Book Review Digest Plus Book Review Digest Plus cites and excerpts reviews of over 8,000 current English-language fiction and nonfiction books for adults and children, excluding reviews of textbooks, government publications, and technical books in law and the sciences. Book Review Digest Plus includes over 115,000 full text reviews and is updated daily. It covers periodicals published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain since 1983, and includes only reviews that have appeared within 18 months of the book's publication. | |
| British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries Spans more than 400 years of personal writings, bringing together the voices of women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The database includes approximately 100,000 pages of material assembled from numerous bibliographies and from newly conducted research as well as 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts. Extending back to 1500, all forms of diaries - religious, travel, and journalistic - enrich the content of the collection. | |
| Cambridge Collections Online Cambridge Companions Online is a fully searchable, full text collection of over 230 titles from the renowned Cambridge Companions series covering literature, classics, philosophy, religion and cultural studies. The database provides search, browse and bookmark functionality. Over 2,300 essays are already included in the collection, with more set to be added as new volumes are published. | |
| Dictionary of National Biography The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography features 56,000 articles on notable people who were born or lived in the British Isles and its former territories and who died before December 31, 2000. In addition to outlining a person's activities, character, and significance, each article also includes dates and places of key events, information on parents and spouses, and places of residence. One in five articles is accompanied by an image of the person who is the subject of the article. | |
| Dissertations & Theses With more than 2 million entries, Proquest Dissertations & Theses (PQD&T) is the single, central, authoritative resource for information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. Dissertations published from 1980 forward include 350-word abstracts written by the author. Master's theses published from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts. | |
| Early English Books Online Contains over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgraves's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661), dating back to the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the turmoil of the English Civil War. Featured authors include Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell and novels by Aphra Behn. Primary sources such as prayer books, pamphlets, proclamations, almanacs, and calendars are provided as images which can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat PDF. | |
| ebrary Academic Complete ebrary and Pepperdine University Libraries have partnered to bring you online access to over 32,000 authoritative titles with concentrations in Business and Economics, Computers and Technology, Humanities, the Social Sciences, and more. | |
| EBSCOhost databases EBSCOhost is a powerful online reference system accessible via the Internet. It offers a variety of proprietary full-text databases and popular databases from leading information providers. The comprehensive databases range from general reference collections to specially designed, subject-specific databases for public, academic, medical, corporate and school libraries. | |
| The Encyclopedia of American Studies The Encyclopedia of American Studies brings together a wide range of disciplines related to the history and cultures of the United States, from pre-colonial days to the present. It features broad, synthetic articles covering areas such as history, literature, art, photography, film, architecture, urban studies, ethnicity, race, gender, economics, politics, wars, consumer culture, and global America; includes over 660 online, searchable articles and bibliographies. | |
| Essay and General Literature Index (Wilson) A bibliographic database that cites essays and articles contained in collections of essays and miscellaneous works focusing on the humanities and social sciences, with subject coverage ranging from economics, political science, and history to criticism of literary works, drama, and film. | |
| Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text Comprehensive bibliographic database covering the entire spectrum of television and film writing. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews. | |
| Film Index International A filmography that gives fully international coverage of around 118,000 films and 685,000 film personalities from over 170 countries. It includes coverage of international film awards and prizes as well as searchable plot summaries and full cast and crew lists. | |
| Google Scholar Search for relevant scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. | |
| HAPI Online The Hispanic American Periodical Index (HAPI) provides access to over 265,000 journal article citations about Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, and Hispanics/Latinos in the United States from 1970 to the present. | |
| In the First Person In the First Person is an index to English language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories. Some are available on the Web, some through Pepperdine's subscriptions to Alexander Street Press collections, and some are held by repositories and archives around the world. Perform in-depth field and keyword searches across letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies within Alexander Street Press databases and more than one million pages of editorially selected materials spanning 400 years. | |
| Iter Iter's bibliography covers all literature pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700). Citations for journal articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies are included. Also included are citations for monographs, and material published in monographs and collections of essays. To date, 1,555 scholarly journal titles, published since 1784, as well as elected essays from 4,401 scholarly collections of essays published since 1996 have been indexed. | |
| JSTOR Includes an extensive archive of journals in 30 subject disciplines in the Arts and Sciences, including classical studies, ecology, economics, history, language and literature, mathematics, music, the history and study of art and architecture, cultural studies, film, folklore, performing arts, philosophy, political science, sociology, and religion. Records are presented in high-resolution page images in combination with full-text searching. | |
| King James Bible (1611) The King James or Authorized Version of the Bible was printed in 1611 and became the standard edition of the Bible for nearly three centuries. Arguably the most influential single document for English literary studies, this fully searchable online version presents the full text (of the "He" version) with all introductory matter, annotation, calendars, genealogies and tables. | |
| Literature Online (LION) A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 200 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources, including the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) that contains over 880,000 records of literary criticism from 1920 to current. | |
| Literature Resource Center The Literature Resource Center is a literature reference database that combines biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information to deliver a resource package on authors and their works (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, and journalism). It includes information from the following works: Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Classical and Medieval Literature and Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Shakespeare Criticism, Drama Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Literature Criticism 1400-1800. | |
| LitFinder Covering world literature and authors throughout history, LitFinder contains a wealth of literary works including over 150,000 full-text poems and 800,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. For those seeking a deeper view into literature, LitFinder also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and more! From Shakespeare's sonnets to poems by Donald Hall or short stories from Edgar Allan Poe to works by Annie Proulx, LitFinder has you covered. | |
| Los Angeles Times (Historic) Every issue from 1881-1985 includes the complete paper -cover-to-cover- with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. | |
| MAS Ultra - School Edition This comprehensive database, designed specifically for high school libraries, contains full text for nearly 500 popular, high school magazines. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator (Lexiles). Full text is also available for 84,774 biographies and 100,554 primary source documents. Additionally, MAS Ultra - School Edition contains more than 350 reference books (including the Columbia Encyclopedia, the CIA World Fact Book and World Almanac & Book of Facts), an Image Collection of 235,186 photos, maps & flags, color PDFs and expanded full text backfiles (back to 1975) for key magazines. | |
| MLA Directory of Periodicals The MLA Directory of Periodicals offers detailed information on over 7,100 journals, with 4,400 currently indexed in the International Bibliography. The detailed entries include editorial contact information, as well as frequency, circulation, subscription prices and submission guidelines. | |
| MLA International Bibliography MLA International Bibliography is an index of journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4,400 journals and series and 1,000 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. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. The MLA Directory of Periodicals and the association's proprietary thesaurus are included. | |
| netLibrary A collection of recent books in electronic format; some older books in the public domain are also available. Note for Mac users: to view netLibrary books properly, you will need to install a browser plug-in found at http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/. | |
| New York Times (Historic) Includes not only news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements, but also historical photos, stock photos, and advertisements. Every issue from 1851-2003 includes the complete paper -cover-to-cover- with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. | |
| North American Immigrant Letters/Diaries North American Immigrant Letters/Diaries consists of personal narratives such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories, including several thousand indexed and searchable pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews. The materials begin around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1920 to 1980. People from many countries are represented, including more recent waves of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. IMLD provides perspectives both on North America and on the immigrants? countries of origin. | |
| Oxford African American Studies Center Contains over 7,500 articles by top scholars and hundreds of primary source documents, images, maps, and charts and tables. | |
| Oxford English Dictionary The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium: the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources. | |
| Oxford Reference Online Quick reference answers from more than 170 dictionaries and reference titles on subjects such as language, science, medicine, humanities, social science and business, plus the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and titles from the Oxford Companion series. | |
| Philosopher's Index Provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields. Covers the areas of ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysic logic as well as material on the philosophy of law, religion, science, history, education, and language. | |
| Project MUSE Provides online access to the full-text of over 300 scholarly journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies. Includes hypertext links for efficient navigation among article bibliographies, citations, endnotes, author biographies and illustrations Project MUSE is a powerful research tool, allowing users to perform keyword and Boolean searching; search full text across all journals in the database, selected journal titles, or in just a single title; search the tables of contents of articles and book reviews by author and title as well as by Library of Congress subject headings. | |
| ProQuest databases ProQuest is organized into databases of related newspapers, magazines, and academic journals that you can use to find articles. The information in each database varies, depending on its focus. There are three types of ProQuest databases: non-historical databases, historical databases, and standalone databases. Non-historical databases, such as Research Library contain general reference information. These databases are cross-searchable, meaning you can search across multiple non-historical databases at the same time. Historical databases, such as New York Times (Historic), contain historical information. You can search multiple historical databases, but you cannot search historical and non-historical databases together. | |
| PsycINFO PsycINFO contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,100 periodicals in over 25 languages. More than 60,000 records are added each year. It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. | |
| RefWorks RefWorks is a Web-based bibliography and database manager that allows users to create their own personal database by importing references from text files or online databases. Users can use these references in writing their papers and automatically format the paper and the bibliography in seconds. As a web-based product, RefWorks is available to users across various platforms including Windows, Mac, and Unix. Pepperdine users also have access to Write-N-Cite, which is a utility which allows Windows, Mac, and Linux users to run an abbreviated version of RefWorks in their word processors and RefShare, which allows the sharing of RefWorks folders with others. | |
| Research Library Research Library provides access to popular and scholarly journals in the social sciences, humanities, business, health, education and general science. It includes citations and abstracts for over 3,820 journals from 1972 forward. Full-text and/or full-image is available for over 2,500 journals from 1972 forward. | |
| Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period An electronic collection of over sixty volumes of lyric poetry by Scottish women, written between 1789 and 1832. The database includes the works of approximately 50 women poets, each with bio-bibliographical sketches or essays, including what is known about their lives, and a bibliography of their primary works and of criticism and reviews. Voices represent women from every social, economic, political, and religious stratum. | |
| Shakespeare Survey Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies, and of the year's major British performances. Shakespeare Survey Online makes all issues of the Survey, including over 90% of the original images, available online for the first time. | |
| The Times Digital Archive (1785 - 1985) Search through the complete digital edition of The Times (London), using keyword searching and hit-term highlighting to retrieve full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. | |
| Women Writers On-Line Full-text database consisting of pre-Victorian women's writing in English. The database is a collection of primary source, rare works encoded in SGML providing search capabilities. The database includes Renaissance Women Online, which contains topic essays and contextual pieces as well. | |
| WorldCat OCLC's Online Union Catalog contains bibliographic records of all types of materials owned by libraries around the world. WorldCat covers materials dating back to the 11th century, includes holdings information from libraries in 45 countries and is updated daily. | |
