Research Guides: ENG 406 Advanced Critical Writing: The Literary Animal: Home

About this guide

The links on this webpage are meant to help you to identify sources for your work in ENG 406. You can contact Patrick Williams if you have any questions about doing so or to get recommendations based on your interests.

Finding Lost/Older versions of Web content

The Wayback Machine may help you to locate versions of stories you've read online that have disappeared. You can enter a URL (or partial URL) and then browse revisions to the site via a calendar--in many cases there will be multiple versions to check out, and you can navigate with in each version with the links on the page.

Reference Resources

Oxford Reference Online
Reference books in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Humanities Subject Specialist

Patrick Williams

Email Me

Contact:

551 Bird Library

315-443-9520

Subjects: Communication, English, Literature, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Religion, Video, Writing and Rhetoric

Recommended Databases for Secondary Sources

You can use Summon to locate articles, book chapters, and books available electronically. Start from the Library homepage and enter your search terms. Then, on the search results page, filter by selecting "Full Text Online" under Refine Your Search. You may limit just to ebooks by also selecting "Book/eBook" under Content Type.

This is an enormous system that searches across over 600 of our subscription databases, so depending on your search terms you may get lots of irrelevant search results. To focus more on the disciplines and publications that are likely to serve as strong sources for your assignments, take a look at the specific subject databases below.

MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO)
Modern Language Association bibliography of publications related to language, literature, folklore, and linguistics.
JSTOR
Full-text archive of scholarly publications, including ebooks, in mathematics, science, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences.
Project Muse
Journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
ProQuest One Literature
Library of English and American literature.
Historical Abstracts with Full-text
Index to articles about world history, excluding the United States and Canada, from 1450 to the present. Covers history of specific subjects in the humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Communication Source
Abstracts of publications covering advertising, discourse, linguistics, media studies, speech-language pathology, and other communication fields.
GreenFILE
Index to publications covering the environment, sustainability, green buildings, energy, recycling and more.
Film and Television Literature Index
Index to journals and magazines covering cinematography, television, production, reviews and more.

Primary Sources & Historical Collections

Age of Exploration
Archival materials spanning five centuries of European maritime exploration, c. 1420-1920. These include audio and visual material; manuscripts and early printed materials; maps and visual content; and correspondence, journals and personal accounts. Themes covered include expedition planning, financing & sponsorship; ships & provisions; new territories; life at sea; indigenous peoples; navigation, scientific observations and instruments; and more.
American History 1493-1945
Correspondence, diaries, government documents, books, pamphlets, broadsides, photographs, artwork, and maps, digitized from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York. Consists of two modules: Module I, Settlement, Commerce, Revolution and Reform: 1493-1859 and Module 2, Civil War, Reconstruction and the Modern Era: 1860-1945.
Children’s Literature and Culture
Chapter, pop-up, and picture books, pamphlets, sketches, toys, games, paper dolls, and sheet music documenting the history and literature of childhood from the 1820s to the 1920s. Content focuses on America as well as international publications, and is digitized from collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum and Library
Early Modern England: Society, Culture and Everyday Life, 1500-1700
Archival documents documenting everyday, political, religious, working, trading, and administrative life in England from 1500-1700. Includes court records, books and images of objects commonly owned by people during the era; wills and inventories; tax and trade records; diaries; and annotated print books. Materials digitized from collections held by the British Library, Canterbury Cathedral Archives, London Metropolitan Archives, Lambeth Palace Library, and others.
East India Company
India Office Records from the British Library, including royal charters, factory records, correspondence, trading diaries, minutes of council meetings, and reports of expeditions from 1599-1947. Documents relate to operations in India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa.
Empire Online
Diaries, illustrations, maps, manuscripts, books, and reports documenting the rise and fall of the European colonial empires worldwide from 1750 to 1960’s. The principal focus is British, it also documents the experience of colonized peoples, focusing on history, politics, and culture.
Food and Drink in History
Manuscript and printed cookbooks, menus, and advertisements documenting the history of food and drink in the United States and Europe from 1500 to 2000. Content addresses issues such as gender, race, status, agriculture, nutrition, and food production from both a culinary and socio-economic approach. Includes Modules I and II.
Frontier Life
Art, broadsides, diaries, memoirs, letters, photographs, maps, legal and business documents documenting the lives of people living at the edges of the Anglophone world from 1650-1920. It covers the colonial frontiers of North America, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
J. Walter Thomson Advertising America
The J. Walter Thompson Company Archive documents the history, operation, policies and accomplishments of one of the world's largest and oldest advertising firms. The papers here reveal many aspects of twentieth-century cultural, social, business, marketing, consumer and economic history while investigating the human psyche.
Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture: The History of Tourism
This resource presents a multi-national journey through well-known, little-known and far-flung destinations unlocked for the average traveller between 1850 and the 1980s. Guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs and personal travel journals provide unique insight into the expansion, accessibility and affordability of tourism for the masses and the evolution of some of the most successful travel agencies in the world.
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
Popular Culture explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history. Explore our interactive chronology to learn a wealth of fascinating facts, take a tour of our visual resources, and watch video footage to experience the spectacular sights and sounds of the period for yourself.
Victorian Popular Culture
Archival Victorian popular culture collections including content from the Senate House Library, University of London; The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; The British Library; the British Film Institute National Archive and more.
World's Fairs
Explore the phenomenon of world's fairs from the Crystal Palace in 1851 and the proliferation of North American exhibitions, to fairs around the world and twenty-first century expos. Through official records, monographs, publicity, artwork and artifacts, this resource brings together multiple archives for rich research opportunities in this diverse topic.

MLA Formatting

Formatting a Research Paper (MLA Style Center)
Information on common formatting issues in MLA style (e.g., margins, text formatting, heading and title, etc.).
MLA Overview and Workshop (Purdue OWL)
Information on MLA formatting and notation style.

EXAMPLES: MLA Style Citations

General MLA Format

Works Cited Page: Basic Format

Additional Resources for using MLA Style Citations

Abbreviations used in MLA Style Format

Sample MLA Style Works Cited Page

The above links are made available through The OWL at Purdue, an Online Writing Lab created and maintained by the English department at Purdue University