Search for your topic in the library catalog, limiting to materials owned by Macalester College and the ebook format.
If you know the collection you want to search, you may want to start your search in the eBook collections noted below. In particular, Credo Reference, eBooks (Gale), and Oxford Reference Online, which are collections of subject encyclopedias, are best searched within their own collections.
For most research in English Literature, there are a couple of main places to start, MLA International Bibliography and Gale Literature. MLAIB, as the premier database for modern languages and literature, has the "superpower" of being able to search for authors and work titles as subjects, making disambiguation much easier. It uses the same platform as Academic Search Premier and several other databases, including America: History and Life, and Historical Abstracts with Full Text which can both be useful for setting context in literary analysis. Gale Literature includes collected essays of literary criticism across decades, giving the researcher the opportunity to easily compare commentary and critique in the context of how something might have been received when first published compared to later reworkings. It also contains background materials on authors, including primary source materials such as interviews.
Finding literary criticism using Gale Literature
Using Gale Literature's Topic Finder as a way to explore the literature
When you're working with a citation from another source, you need to start by looking for the journal title in our catalog to find the article in one of our databases. This tutorial shows you the steps to do this.