LIT 499: Dante Alighieri

The following Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) reveal literary criticism, mostly from books and book chapters. (Cataloging librarians developed LCSH to describe book content.) Tweaking the canned subject searches reveals even more criticism published in journal articles. The key is to retain "criticism" or one of the other sub-divisions as a keyword (or search term). For example, the keywords Dante AND criticism if restricted to the Subject field reveal about 400 peer-reviewed articles published in MLN, PMLA, and other journals.

Most useful LCSH:

• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Criticism and interpretation
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Divina commedia

Additional LCSH:

• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Aesthetics
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Authorship
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Appreciation
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Contemporaries
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Friends and associates
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Influence
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Knowledge
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Language
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Political and social views
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 — Religion

Employ LCSH in WorldCat, a "union catalog" of tens of millions of book records, to retrieve additional titles held by other libraries relevant to your Dante research. Request items of interest via our interlibrary loan service.

What is a catalog?

A catalog is a "comprehensive list of the books, periodicals, maps, and other materials in a given collection, arranged in systematic order to facilitate retrieval (usually alphabetically by author, title, and/or subject). In most modern libraries, the [paper] card catalog has been converted to machine-readable bibliographic records and is available online. The purpose of a library catalog... is to offer the user a variety of approaches or access points to the information contained in the collection" (ODLIS).

Gitenstein Library's web scale discovery service—an extension of the online catalog—remains the best option for finding books and e-books held by our library. It now incorporates additional media (e.g., journal articles) from licensed databases and scholarly sources on the open web.