LibGuides: ENGL 205G American Literature I &amp; ENGL 255G American Literature II: Finding Articles in Library Databases

Suggested Library Databases

For background information (straight-to-the-point, basic information on a topic), go into one of these suggested background sources and search your topics related to your author or work (such as, "civil rights movement" or "gender inequality"). These may be useful to get some basic facts and information about the historical or cultural context that influenced your author or inspired their work. You may also be able to find biographical information about your author by using them.

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Gale EBOOKS This link opens in a new window
Gale in Context US History This link opens in a new window

Bloom's Literature is another useful database to use for biographical information about your author. It also may have information about the themes, characters, literary elements, and even literary criticism, analysis, and essays for the work or text you are researching.

Bloom's Literature This link opens in a new window

Other databases that are useful for in-depth, detailed, literary criticism and analysis of authors and their works include:

Gale Literature This link opens in a new window
Looking for literary criticism? Start here! Full-text literary criticism, author biographies, and commentary of literary works. Includes the Gale eBooks, Gale Literature Criticism, and Gale Literature Resource Center collections as well as content unique to Gale Literature .
Gale Literature Criticism This link opens in a new window
Digitized full-text literary criticism, author biographies, and commentary of literary works appearing in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Drama Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, and other print Gale literature series titles.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full-text scholarly articles from journals and books covering the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
One of the essential databases to your NCC research experience! Search for your topic here to find articles from scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers and other reference sources. Many articles are full text.
EBSCOhost Research Databases This link opens in a new window
One of the essential databases to your NCC research experience! Search for your topic here to find articles from scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers and other reference sources. Many articles are full text.

If you aren't having luck searching a specific database or collection like the ones listed above, you can always try EBSCO Discovery Service as a way to search across all our collections. Remember to choose your search keywords carefully and apply appropriate search filters to help you navigate your results better.

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) This link opens in a new window

Video Tutorials

Need help searching some of the databases listed above? You can view our search tutorials:

See more tutorials on the NCC Libraries YouTube channel.

When the library doesn't have access to an article you want...

You may discover an article that would be useful for your topic, only to find that the library does not have full-text access to it through our databases. If that happens, you can submit an interlibrary loan request, and we will see if another library with access to full-text of that article is willing to share it with us. Most often, the articles will be shared with you by email, but they may take 2-3 days to arrive. Work with a librarian if you need help identifying books to interlibrary loan or assistance with the request.