For sustained and deeper literary criticism, find relevant scholarly articles in library databases.
Think of scholarship as a conversation - a conversation between critic, text, and other critics. Use the Works Cited to track down sources engaged by a critic.
Build your own conversation, integrating sources and voices that participate in your original analysis.
To find relevant ideas, sometimes it works to search for articles and books on your specific topic and other times a more general approach works. Here are a few samples searches and sources. Be sure to try others!
Orange is the New Black:
The Nickel Boys:
Ideas:
The databases below all contain scholarly literary criticism. If an option, limit to scholarly peer-reviewed journals.
See the image below for more details.
You can limit your One Search to scholarly (peer-reviewed) journal articles. Just select Peer Reviewed Journals from the results page.
When you do research on current authors and works, sometimes there has not yet been a lot written about them. That's okay!
Scholarship represents your original thinking about a text or theme in literature. As part of your analysis you can integrate relevant sources, even if they are not about your specific text. Think about:
Here is an example of ideas and analysis about masculinity in the prison writing of Canadian men which I could apply to my reading of "How to Kill Someone" or The Nickel Boys. .
Please click on the image below to enlarge it.
Example: The highlighted sections of this article abstract (I would then read the whole article) might support an analysis of how masculinity is explored and constructed in other works of prison literature, not just Canadian texts.
Search the library collection and beyond for scholarly analysis of literary texts in books.
To find the scholarly conversation, try adding criticism, literary criticism, criticism and interpretation, or literature criticism as keyword or subject term.
Sample book titles