Biographical Essays in Databases:
Book-Length Biographies
Enter the author's name and the word biography (e.g., james joyce biography) and choose Library Catalog search.
You can also search for books published about a specific author or about an author's work. To do this, 1) go to "advanced search," 2) select "Browse" from the top banner, and 3) enter the author's last name first name (e.g., joyce james).
Subject headings with the subheading Biography will be biographies of the author.
Print Books
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature.
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature
One of the most popular destinations for North American motorcyclists is Nova Scotia and its famous Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island. This new travel guide written by local motorcyclist and travel writer, Rannie Gillis, is the complete resource for any two-wheel traveler wanting to visit the high points of this beautiful part of Canada. The book covers not only Cape Breton Island and the Cabot Trail but also the rest of Nova Scotia, as well as the neighboring provinces of Labrador, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and eastern Quebec including the wild and wonderful Gaspe Peninsula. Each trip has a detailed route description, easy-to-follow maps, and unique photographs -- all brought to life by Gillis' informed and colorful narration. Local customs, history, tips for rider-friendly restaurants, ideas on unique lodging, comfortable campsites, and information on the border crossing between the US and Canada are included.
Hispanic Literature of the United States
Providing a detailed historical overview of Hispanic literature in the United States from the Spanish colonial period to the present, this extensive chronology provides the context within which such writers as Sandra Cisneros, Rodolfo Anaya, and Oscar Hijuelos have worked. Hispanic literature in the United States is covered from the Spanish colonial period to the present. A detailed historical overview and a separate survey of Hispanic drama provide researchers and general readers with indispensable information and insight into Hispanic literature. An extensive chronology traces the development of Hispanic literature and culture in the United States from 1492 to 2002, providing the context within which such Hispanic writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Rodolfo Anaya, and Oscar Hijuelos have worked. Topics include an overview and chronology of Hispanic literature in the United States, a who's who of Hispanic authors, significant trends, movements, and themes, publishing trends, an overview of Hispanic drama, adn the 100 essential Hispanic literary works. Biographical entries describe the careers, importance, and major works of notable Hispanic novelists, poets, and playwrights writing in English or Spanish. A comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography lists primary sources. Essays detail the most important past and current trends in Hispanic literature, including bilingualism, Chicano literature, children's literature, exile literature, folklore, immigrant literature, Nuyorican literature, poetry, and women and feminism in Hispanic literature. More than 100 exceptional illustrations of writers, plays in performance, and first editions of important works are included.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays that reflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf. At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures are discussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of thewriter's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with a bibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion. A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers aclose reading of the given work, placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticated enough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating. The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they also gather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim for comprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right. In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl
Literature and Authors in Historical Context
African Literature and Its Times
British and Irish Literature and Its Times
British and Irish Literature and Its Times
Italian Literature and Its Times
Latin American Literature and Its Times
Literature and Its Times
Literature and its times. Supplement 1 : profiles of notable literary works and the historical events that influenced themMiddle Eastern Literature and Its Times
Histories and Surveys of Literature
The Cambridge History of American Literature
Covers colonial period to the 1990s. The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the spectrum of new and established directions in American writing. An interdisciplinary distillation of American literary history, it weds the voice of traditional criticism with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies.
The Columbia Literary History of the United States
For the first time in four decades, there exists an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the literature of the United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties. This comprehensive volume -- one of the century's most important books in American studies -- extensively treats Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Hemingway, and other long-cherished writers, while also giving considerable attention to recently discovered writers such as Kate Chopin and to literary movements and forms of writing not studied amply in the past. Informed by the most current critical and theoretical ideas, it sets forth a generation's interpretation of the rise of American civilization and culture. The Columbia Literary History of the United States contains essays by today's foremost scholars and critics, overseen by a board of distinguished editors headed by Emory Elliott of Princeton University. These contributors reexamine in contemporary terms traditional subjects such as the importance of Puritanism, Romanticism, and frontier humor in American life and writing, but they also fully explore themes and materials that have only begun to receive deserved attention in the last two decades. Among these are the role of women as writers, readers, and literary subjects and the impact of writers from minority groups, both inside and outside the literary establishment.
The Literature of Ireland
One of Ireland's foremost literary and cultural historians, Terence Brown's command of the intellectual and cultural currents running through the Irish literary canon is second to none, and he has been enormously influential in shaping the field of Irish studies. These essays reflect the key themes of Brown's distinguished career, most crucially his critical engagement with the post-colonial model of Irish cultural and literary history currently dominant in Irish Studies. With essays on major figures such as Yeats, MacNeice, Joyce and Beckett, as well as contemporary authors including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Brian Friel, this volume is a major contribution to scholarship, directing scholars and students to new approaches to twentieth-century Irish cultural and literary history.
The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation
'Excellent Guide... The essays are generally readable, concisely written and informative; the one on the Thousand and One Nights is a fine example of these features.' -Forum for Modern Language Studies'For Classicists, whose undergraduate teaching brief consists largely in teaching tyros how to translate from Latin before they can begin to explore the joys of literary appreciation, this book elicits a feeling of surprised delight 'How could I have got on so long without it?' At the same time it offers the traditional 'desert-island' compendious fare that will lure even the most dedicated Classicist into surreptitious dipping... it is an extremely useful vademecum to a particular aspect of English literature.' -Scholia'A remarkable amount of close comparison of competing versions is packed into the entries.' -English Studies'The Guide should become an invaluable resource for scholars... It is a treasure house for anyone interested in foreign literature in English garb and its impact on Anglophone culture. There is simply no alternative resource of this kind, and a hitherto largely uncharted territory now has its first extensive map.' -Notes and Queries'Peter France's impressive editorial enterprise should be heartily welcomed as an important remedy for a long-established blind-spot of literary historians. In the richness of its diverse material The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation manages to convey a new picture of how culturally significant the work of translators and translations into English have been.' -Notes and Queries'Read thoroughly, the introductory essays and the essays on particular literatures illuminate and extend one another. There is a continual raising of vital issues in the best possible way, by concrete examples... Peter France, whose own contributions are first-rate, is to be congratulated for gathering information, discussion and concrete instances of great interactive and generative power.' - David Constantine, Times Literary Supplement'It will be a pity if this book is only used for reference and as a guide.' -David Constantine, Times Literary Supplement'A horizon-expanding book whose editor has made a remarkable contribution to cultural life in Scotland and far beyond.' -Robert Crawford, The Scotsman'No individual is qualified to 'review' let alone assess seriously so vast a terrain. The essential impulse is one of gratitude... Simply to look up what has been translated from what languages, and when, is to have access to essential aspects of poetics, literary criticism, and intellectual history. More subtly, these entries and reading lists invite one to reflect on what has not (or only infrequently) been translated, and possible reasons why... The Oxford Guide is a prodigal introduction to joys some of which may before long be lost.' -Translation and Literature'The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation is an excellent book, being the result of the collaborative efforts of 113 experts, mostly from British universities, under the editorial guidance of Peter France... A fascinating and very comprehensive, panoramic view of its subject as well as being very readable.' -European Journal of English StudiesThis book, written by a team of experts from many countries, provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which translation has brought the major literature of the world into English-speaking culture. Part I discusses theoretical issues and gives an overview of the history of translation into English. Part II, the bulk of the work, arranged by language of origin, offers critical discussions, with bibliographies, of the translation history of specific texts (e.g. the Koran, the Kalevala), authors (e.g. Lucretius, Dostoevsky), genres (e.g. Chinese poetry, twentieth-century Italian prose) and national literatures (e.g. Hungarian, Afrikaans).
A Short History of English Literature
Thoroughly updated, this book remains the best overall survey of English literature available.Brings this successful book up to date with new material on, among others, Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel, Martin Amis and Graham Swift Very accessible
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Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Handbooks
A Glossary of Literary Terms
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
