ENGLISH 190: Emily Dickinson

English Indexes

mburnett@library.berkeley.edu (Michaelyn Burnette) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:41:07 -0700

Most databases offer help screens with information about structuring your search and other tips. Often the links to help are in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Familiarizing yourself with the database's protocols is a good way to produce successful searches.

Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB) (UCB only) The MLAIB is the largest index of critical scholarship on literature, language, linguistics, and folklore, containing over 2 million citations. The online version starts with the 1926 annual bibliography, but coverage of JSTOR titles goes back to the first issue published.

until 1956, most of the items included in the bibliography were written by scholars in the U. S.
subject indexing expanded dramatically in 1981; entries before that time usually have only the subject author’s name, national literature and century as descriptors.
does not include book reviews and did not index most monographs, especially collections of essays, until recently. Users must consult catalogs to ensure finding monographs or collections of essays.
use the layout of the advanced search box to create a Boolean search: (1) put synonyms in the rows (across)—the search results will have to have at least one of those words (2) words in different rows will be ANDed together and the search results will have to include words from all the rows.
use truncation symbols: * for variant endings and ? for internal truncation—for example, dickens* will yield Dickens, Dickensian, Dickens’s, etc. The search wom?n will bring results with woman and women. When you get no results from a search, try truncating the term(s).
author searches bring the work of scholars, not of literary authors. Use key word or descriptor searches to get scholarly items about an author
UC e-Links will lead you to full-text of articles or to the Melvyl catalog, where you can see if Berkeley or another UC library has the item. If Berkeley does not own, use the orange request button to bring up an online interlibrary loan form.

Academic Search Complete (UCB only) A multidisciplinary index to articles in thousands of journals with full-text for many. Using Choose Databases (located above the search boxes) you can add other databases and do one search in several at a time. Remember to use key words only.

sometimes indexes newer articles before the MLAIB
indexes book reviews of scholarly books and of fiction, poetry, drama, movies
can search several indexes at once by clicking on “Choose databases” above the search box(es)
good place to start doing research for topics that go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries

Project Muse Collection of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, for the most part newer issues. You can browse by journal title or search.

JSTOR Contains more journals than Project Muse but, in many cases, does not have the newer issues because publishers were allowed to blockade from 1-10 years of their recent issues. Even with that restriction, JSTOR is a treasure trove.

This guide has been archived

mburnett@library.berkeley.edu (Michaelyn Burnette) — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:42 -0700

Please note: this course guide was created during a previous semester, and is no longer being actively maintained. For a list of current course guides, please see http://lib.berkeley.edu/alacarte/course-guides.

Dickinson Sites

mburnett@library.berkeley.edu (Michaelyn Burnette) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:02:54 -0700

Emily Dickinson Lexicon "is a dictionary of alphabetized headword entries for all of the words in Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (Johnson 1955 and Franklin 1998 editions). The scope of the Dickinson lexicon is comprehensive. A team of lexicographers and reviewers has examined almost 100,000 individual word occurrences to create approximately 9,275 headword entries. The EDL includes proper nouns, person names, and place names that are not usually listed in general dictionaries of the English language. Because high-frequency function words such as a, of, and the are important for Dickinson studies, the EDL includes basic definitions for 168 words that were omitted from Rosenbaum's concordance (xi) with their 38,235 occurrences. Words from Dickinson’s collected letters are not included in the EDL at this time."

Emily Dickinson Journal
peer-reviewed journal devoted to Dickinson and her time

Emily Dickinson Bibliography Many links to criticism, bibliographies of criticism, and older editions of her poems.

Emily Dickinson Museum Links to information about Dickinson, her milieu and her life.

Dickinson Electronic Archive is a " website devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, her writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work."

Houghton Library's Emily Dickinson Collection

Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Site with online versions of his works, concordance, biographical and other information about RWE.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Authoritative dictionary with etymology, definitions, and quotations.

King James Bible