A wealth of resources are available to assist you with research concerning works of literature, including plays, poems, novels, and short stories. Some of these may also be helpful if you are assigned to write an original work of your own.

A good place to begin is often the library's own reference collection. A few of the more extensive reference works in the Clark State library are listed below. Many more can be found through the catalog or by perusing the reference shelves.

• Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism - REF PN 771 .G27
  

This work is "designed to serve as an introduction to authors who died between 1900 and 1999 and to the most significant interpretations of these author's works." More in-depth than Masterplots, but obviously limited to the last century, this source can be a little confusing to use. In addition to entries on specific works, it includes surveys of individual authors as well as groups of authors, and topics such as "The Harlem Renaissance", "The Rise of the English Essay", and "Electronic 'Books': Hypertext and Hyperfiction". Be sure to familiarize yourself with the various indices, including the cumulative (for all volumes) author index and the cumulative topic index.

• Critical Survey of Poetry - REF PR 502 .C85
  
• Critical Survey of Drama - REF PR 623 .C75
  
• Critical Survey of Long Fiction - REF PR 821 .C7

All three of these multi-volume sets are in the "English Language Series", and are arranged by author. Included as well are survey essays dealing with topics such as the novella, African-American drama, or explication of poetry.

• American Writers - REF PS 129 .A55

Subtitled "A Collection of Literary Biographies", American Writers includes biographical information, but the primary focus is on the works of each author. Entries often run to 20 pages or more, and include bibliographies both of the author's works and of criticism of the works. Supplements include more recent additions.

• British Writers - REF PR 85 .B688

Similar to American Writers. This set is arranged chronologically by the subjects' birth dates.

• Latin American Writers - REF PQ 7081 .L37

Like British Writers, this set, by the publishers of American Writers, is arranged by the birth dates of the authors.

• American Women Writers - REF PS 147 .A4

For each author, this set includes a critical essay on her works, biographical data, a complete bibliography of her works, and a selected bibliography of works about the author. This is a valuable source of information on authors who are often difficult to locate elsewhere.

• Twentieth Century Authors: a Biographical Dictionary - REF PN 771.K86

As suggested in the subtitle, this work offers brief biographies of about 1700 authors "whose books are familiar to readers of English". Thus authors who write in other languages are only included if their works have been widely translated into English. Entries range from 300 to 1500 words, and a very brief list of principal works both by and about each author is included.

• The New Moulton's Library of Literary Criticism - REF PR 85 .N39

Covering both British and American authors, the entries in this set offer critical essays as well as brief biographical and historical background. Some entries are quite extensive. The article on Chaucer is 113 pages long. Coverage begins with earliest medieval written works and runs through the end of the nineteenth century.

• Masterplots - REF PN 44 .M33

This multi-volume set is a sort of cumulated and abridged Cliff Notes. It provides analysis of more than two thousand works of world literature, including a brief summary of the plot and a critique. Some more important works also receive a "Further Critical Evaluation". This is a good starting point for many frequently studied works of literature.

• Cyclopedia of Literary Characters II - REF PN 44 .M3

This companion set to Masterplots gives greater detail concerning about 12,000 characters which appear in about 1400 novels, plays, epics and other important works of world literature. It is arranged alphabetically by the titles of the works, and characters are listed in the order of their importance. Indexes by author and character name are included.

This handout concerns only print works found in the Clark State Library. Many other valuable resources are available online through OhioLINK and on the Internet. A separate handout, entitled "Literature--Online Resources" covers some of these.