Need to dig up information about religion and marriage in 18th-century England? Find out more about the conditions of city life and industrialization in the 19th?
Cambridge Companions
Offers introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods.
Cambridge Histories Online
More than 260 volumes from the esteemed Cambridge Histories series covering 14 subject areas including general and regional history, literary studies, philosophy and religious studies.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell hand-colored plates from the William Blake Archive.
You can also leverage subject headings to discover sociohistorical information about a particular point in history:
< 18th century >
< united states >
< religion >
Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) Provides more than 16,000 biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres. DLB Complete Online includes the DLB main series, the DLB Documentary Series, and the DLB Yearbook Series.
MLA International Bibliography A subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature. The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers.
For best results, scroll down to the AUTHOR'S WORK field, and use the Look up Author's works. Remember to search using the original (not translated) title of the work--a quick source like Wikipedia can give you the original title.
After you've hit "search," remember that you can add in key words into the search bar. Remember that records in MLAIB are short, so keep your terms simple. Look through the results you do have to find better words for your next search.
JSTOR Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately one year ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. Especially good for historic or classic articles in most fields. Coverage: 1665 to present. How to export to RefWorks
You can also find companions to the work of a particular author, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, which serve as quick-and-dirty introductions and overviews to the scholarly treatment of a given author's output. Search for such companions by constructing a search like the one below:
You can also search for a theme across multiple literary works. A subject search in the catalog for hell, for example, shows narrower categories under which books are grouped. Click on any of the following to see the list of books Kresge owns under that particular theme:
Hell in literature
Devil in literature
Demonology in literature