Background Information
Reference sources (also called background sources or background information) are helpful when beginning the research process. They can give you a working knowledge of the subject area and introduce you to important names, facts, issues, and other concepts related to your topic. These key terms will come in handy when you begin searching databases for secondary source literature.
Databases
- Literary Reference CenterA full-text database that combines information from major reference works, books, literary journals as well as original content. Reference materials include plot summaries, synopses and work overviews, author biographies, and more.
- Literature Resource CenterFull-text articles from scholarly journals and literary magazines are combined with critical essays, work and topic overviews, full-text works, and biographies.
Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Guides
- A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (eBook)This dictionary explains and illustrates frequently encountered literary symbols and gives thousands of cross-references and quotations.
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (eBook)This Dictionary collects, categorises and intersects literary, aesthetic, political and cultural terms that in one way or another came into being through the debates, conflicts, co-operations, experiments that characterised modernism.
- The Oxford English Dictionary (Print)English language historical dictionary - the premier dictionary for tracing the meaning of a word over time.