LibGuides: LIT 311/499 and WGS 314: Women's Autobiographies: Find Articles and Journals

Core English Literature Databases

Tier 1 Literature Databases
Tier 2 Literature Databases

Best bets:

MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB)
MLAIB is the go-to abstracting and indexing database for literature, linguistics, and folklore. Also good for rhetoric, composition, and film. Students looking for peer-reviewed journal articles (i.e., scholarly criticism) about a literary figure or primary literary work should begin here. Also indexes books, book chapters, dissertations, translations, and even websites. Easily link from citations in MLAIB to the full-text article in JSTOR, Project MUSE, etc. The earliest citations date from the late nineteenth century.
Literature Online (ProQuest)
Excellent source for literary criticism. One of LION's major draws is that it provides online access to over 300 volumes in the Cambridge Companions series.
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(Dates vary.) Includes full text and abstracts to English and American poetry, drama, and prose from 600 to the present. Also includes literary criticism, author biographies, guides to major literary works, thousands of primary texts of poetry, prose, and drama, and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.
Literature Resource Center (Gale)
Find literary criticism plus author biographies and bibliographies. LRC includes entries from Contemporary Authors and Dictionary of Literary Biography.
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Literature Resource Center is an online resource for research on literary topics, authors, and their works. Its coverage includes all genres and disciplines, all time periods, and all regions of the world.

Critical journal archives:

JSTOR
The premier journal archive, JSTOR provides full-text access to 428 high-quality, peer-reviewed language and literature journal titles, the earliest of which date to the late nineteenth century.
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(Earliest Full Text from the Late 1800s.) A full text, full image journal archive. Coverage of journals generally begins with their first volume and is updated to within three-to-five years of the current issue. Allows keyword searching of the full text of all articles, as well as browsing of particular journal issues. Subject strengths are African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, ecology, economics/finance, general science, history, literature, math/statistics, philosophy, political science, population/demography, and sociology.
Project MUSE
Another important journal archive, Project Muse provides full-text access to 187 journals in the Literature category dating from approximately the mid-1990s to date.
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(Dates vary from 1995-present) Access to the full text of more than 100 journals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and mathematics from Johns Hopkins University Press and other publishers. Complements rather than competes with JSTOR in that combined the two databases provide maximum chronological coverage.

Humanities Full Text
Employ Humanities Full Text to search or browse over 50 English language and literary journals, most of which provide coverage dating from the mid-1980s.
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(Indexing & Abstracting, 1982-; earliest Full Text from 1995.) Provides citations, abstracts, and selected full text for periodical articles and reviews from English language periodicals. Subjects include archaeology, classical studies, area studies, folklore, history, language, literature, performing arts, philosophy, religion and theology.
Literary Reference Center
Includes a mix of secondary literary criticism with traditional reference material including plot summaries and biographies. Also incorporates reviews, primary source author interviews, poems, and short stories.
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(Date: various) specifically designed for public libraries, secondary schools, junior/community college and undergraduates. Includes plot summaries, literary criticism, author biographies, book reviews, classic and contemporary poems, short stories, author interviews, classic texts.

Featured Journals

Auto/Biography Studies: a/b
This peer-reviewed journal "serves as a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship and criticism on all forms of lifewriting. Covers autobiography, biography, diaries, and letters as well as the relationships between lifewriting and other discourse. Emphasizes work that deals with diverse ethnic and national topics."
Biography
This peer-reviewed, University of Hawaii Press journal "focuses on life-writing and biographical theory."
European Journal of Life Writing
"European Journal of Life Writing is an interdisciplinary open access journal, published by the European section of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA Europe). The EJLW aims to provide a forum for work in the field of all forms of life narratives, with contributions ranging from conceptual to practical and creative work."
Fourth Genre
This Michigan State University Press journal is "devoted to publishing notable, innovative work in nonfiction" including autobiography.
Life Writing
"Life Writing is one of the leading journals in the field of biography and autobiography, and publishes scholarly articles, critically informed creative personal essays, and book reviews." Click more for step-by-step directions on how to access articles in this important journal.
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Our library does not subscribe to this journal but students can find relevant article(s). Click on MLA International Bibliography from the left-hand column of this page. At the top of MLA's homepage (blue bar), click Browse Periodicals. Search for Life Writing. Click on the resulting hyperlinked title for a brief record with information about the journal. Now click Search within this publication. Browse the resulting list of articles or enter additional search terms to narrow your results. MLA International Bibliography indexes articles in Life Writing from April 2007 through June 2021. Find citations to articles published since summer 2021 from the journal's homepage at Taylor & Francis Online (just Google it). Request any article(s) of interest via our library's interlibrary loan (ILL) service.
Lifewriting Annual
"Presents theoretical, critical and scholarly essays on various forms of lifewriting, including memoir, biography, autobiography, journals and letters." Our library does not subscribe but students should be able to quickly retrieve articles relevant to their topics from the link above.
Persona Studies
"Persona Studies is a peer reviewed academic journal that explores the construction of the public self."