Neal Wyatt, Editor
Stefanie R. Bluemle, Guest Columnist
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Librarians responsible for the collection development of their library’s literary criticism section know that it is a difficult task to select the right book. Is the Oxford World’s Classic or the Penguin the best imprint of Jane Eyre? Which translation of War and Peace best captures Tolstoy’s language? Does the collection need both the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein, and if not, which edition? These questions are in addition to the issue of cataloging. Just how many records for Pride and Prejudice are we comfortable asking patrons to navigate? Once past the primary sources, collection development gets even stickier. Librarians new to the subject area must navigate an alphabet soup of titles—CLC, DLB, CA (green and orange)—and a confusing run of titles that are so similar you almost need a key to remember what slight difference in approach might make a big difference in your collection. And then there are the readers—facing deadlines for papers, navigating difficult and layered texts, or simply exploring books they love. How do we build collections that are responsive to their various needs? If only it were as easy as securing the complete run of Twayne’s Masterwork Studies Series and keeping our subscription to Gale’s Novels for Students up-to-date.
To help navigate the lush but messy waters of literary criticism, I asked Stefanie R. Bluemle to create a guide that both surveyed the resources and modeled the process of crafting a responsive collection. Stefanie is a reference librarian and library liaison to the departments of history, philosophy, and religion at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She earned her MLS in 2008 at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). Prior to entering the library science program, she earned her MA in English, also from IUB; her focus was nineteenth-century American literature. While conducting her graduate studies in English, Stefanie worked at IUB as an associate instructor, teaching a variety of composition classes to first-year undergraduates.—Editor
Literary criticism, the explication of the meaning and function of all forms of poetry and prose, exploded in terms of scope and even sheer quantity in the twentieth century. From a mid-twentieth-century emphasis on texts as discrete, self-contained entities to a blossoming of interest in the larger historical, social, and political contexts from which such texts arise, criticism expanded to address the variety of ways in which even those questions traditionally under the purview of other disciplines take shape in literature. In the early twenty-first century, literary criticism continues its interrogation of and departure from the traditional canon as its primary unit of analysis, embracing lesser-known authors, popular texts and other media, and lesser-read texts by prominent literary figures. Cultural studies remains influential to literary criticism, as evidenced by continued examination of the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the political sources and implications of cultural production. Postcolonial studies lends critics a means of grappling with literature and power in a global context. A variety of other methodologies persist as well, including deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, and feminism, to name only a few. At the same time, new trends and lines of inquiry constantly form. Even as scholarly interest in the body faded, for example, animal studies emerged. And more marginal trends, like ecocriticism, continue to clarify their particular methodologies. All told, literary criticism is a dynamic discipline with an interest in the implications of literary production that go well beyond the confines of text and language alone.
To extract a “core” set of resources from a field so wide-ranging in scope and methodology would be reductive, to say the least. Therefore this resource guide does not recommend specific works so much as it functions as a pathfinder in that word’s most literal possible sense: that is, this guide assists primarily in finding and discriminating among the resources it highlights. In recognition of the fact that every library’s collection must serve its particular reading community, the specific works listed here should be regarded as representative examples of high-quality work rather than the best that any given genre has to offer. That said, however, two basic assumptions do underlie the construction of this guide. First, the guide is intended more for smaller, especially public, libraries that are limited in the number of resources they can acquire. This guide takes the wide-ranging levels of readership at such libraries into account; at the same time, it assumes that the ultraspecific, highly theoretical, graduate- or higher-level texts common at research libraries will be mostly outside such collections’ scope. Second, although this guide does not assume an audience of high-level researchers, it does strive to identify resources that would be considered high-quality by such researchers. Put simply, all of the resources here—those the guide lists directly and those to which it indirectly points—are written by respected authors, released by quality publishers, and recent enough to reflect up-to-date trends in literary scholarship.
The guide has two main sections. The first introduces a broad set of high-quality literary resources: series, publishers, databases, and Web resources. This section includes only a small number of specific titles, as its main purpose is to suggest general pathways for locating material. The second section models the process suggested in the first section by highlighting books and other resources that might be relevant to a library updating its collection of material on a specific author: Herman Melville.
Primary Sources
Fiction and Nonfiction
The series listed here focus on “classic” works of literature: So many publishers print editions of such works that it can be difficult to discriminate among them. These series provide significant context or guidance and thus can be valuable aids in approaching difficult texts. All three include bibliographies or supplementary reading lists; otherwise, the presentation of each is unique.
Norton Critical Editions
Generally the most extensive critical editions available. Norton includes little introductory material, and footnotes are often brief. But each primary text is followed by numerous excerpts from other works in such categories as background material, sources for the text and other contemporary contexts, contemporary reviews, and modern literary criticism.
Oxford World’s Classics
Oxford’s introductions are readable guides to a basic understanding of some of the texts’ main questions and themes. Notes may be lengthy but are usually not great in number; some editions also contain brief appendixes that provide context or reprint material that was associated with the text in earlier editions.
Penguin Classics
Penguin’s introductions are brief (perhaps twenty to thirty pages) and provide readable critical and historical background. Notes are often numerous and in-depth, but they are placed at the end of the volume so the flow of the text itself is not interrupted. Many volumes also contain appendixes devoted to contemporary contexts.
Poetry
“Classic” works of poetry, especially longer poems, will likely be available as critical editions from the publishers listed above. However, recent or obscure poetry may be much more difficult to locate.
The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry. Columbia Univ. Pr.
A series of books that index poems—by title, author, subject, first line, and last line—and identify the anthologies and collections in which those poems were published. Also available as an electronic resource.
Web Resources
The resources here are among the broadest and most comprehensive electronic book collections available on the Internet. Additional high-quality sites devoted to more specific collections can be located through resources like the Librarians’ Internet Index (accessed Jan. 23, 2010).
Bartleby.com: Great Books Online.
An online publisher of fiction, verse, and nonfiction works in the public domain. All works are available full-text for free.
Internet Archive: Text Archive.
From the same project that provides the “Wayback Machine,” an online archive that seeks to preserve books and other texts in digital form. The text archive includes collections of American and Canadian literature and children’s books, among others.
Internet Public Library.
This URL leads directly to the Online Texts page of the Internet Public Library’s literature collection; the links provided here are excellent gateways to more specific collections of e-books.
Project Gutenberg.
The oldest project designed to provide e-books for free. Project Gutenberg offers texts for download or for reading online in plain-text format.
Secondary Sources
Reference Resources
Almost innumerable reference resources exist in literature and literary criticism. For the most part, then, this section of the guide addresses major series and publishers rather than individual titles. Of course, not every high-quality reference resource is published as part of a series; catalog searching will unearth these titles.
Bibliographies
The two texts listed here are the most important bibliographies of literary reference works; they can provide invaluable assistance in selecting reference resources that go well beyond those mentioned in this guide. Additional bibliographies (of primary and secondary resources in all areas of literature) are available from publishers like Greenwood, Gale, Scarecrow, Oxford, and Cambridge.
Harner, James L. Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies. 5th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008 (ISBN: 978-0873-52808-5).
An indispensable, comprehensive guide to reference resources in all areas of literature. This text is divided into sections by either the type of resource (e.g., bibliographies of bibliographies, biographical resources) or the broad area of literature under study (e.g., American literature, Irish literature).
Bracken, James K. Reference Works in British and American Literature. 2nd ed. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1998 (ISBN: 978-1-563-08518-5).
Highlights reference resources that focus on a single author. This category is outside the scope of Harner’s bibliography, which makes Bracken’s book a potentially useful supplement despite its age.
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
Broadly construed, literary encyclopedias and dictionaries fall into two categories. The first focuses on the literature of particular historical periods, movements, or genres; these resources may define terms as varied in type as authors, settings, events, texts, and concepts. The second broad category defines literary terms and concepts from critical theory; these resources largely retain their relevance across literary movements and time periods insofar as they approach literature from a disciplinary rather than historical perspective. The encyclopedia- and dictionary-type reference works listed here are representative examples; numerous other publishers have released similar titles.
[...] From the Introduction: Librarians responsible for the collection development of their library’s literary criticism section know that it is a difficult task to select the right book. Is the Oxford World’s Classic or the Penguin the best imprint of Jane Eyre? Which translation of War and Peace best captures Tolstoy’s language? Does the collection need both the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein, and if not, which edition? These questions are in addition to the issue of cataloging. Just how many records for Pride and Prejudice are we comfortable asking patrons to navigate? Once past the primary sources, collection development gets even stickier. Librarians new to the subject area must navigate an alphabet soup of titles—CLC, DLB, CA (green and orange)—and a confusing run of titles that are so similar you almost need a key to remember what slight difference in approach might make a big difference in your collection. [...]