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Literature

A guide to literature research resources from UMSL Libraries.

Text: Literature Research Guide. Bookshelf in the background.

Welcome!

This guide offers an introduction to literature resources and research at UMSL Libraries. You will find help with:

  • Using our main search tool, Discover@UMSL, to find articles, books, and more
  • Locating reference texts for background information
  • Navigating literature and literary criticism databases
  • Citing sources

Use the navigation tabs on the left to explore. For more advanced research help, please contact the library!


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What's New?

The Cambridge History of Native American Literature

Endeavors to capture and question the contested character of Indigenous texts and the way they are evaluated. It delineates significant periods of literary and cultural development in four sections: "Traces & Removals" (pre-1870s); "Assimilation and Modernity" (1879-1967); "Native American Renaissance" (post-1960s); and "Visions & Revisions" (21st century).

The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro

An accessible introduction to key aspects of the novelist's remarkable body of work. The volume addresses Ishiguro's engagement with fundamental questions of humanity and personal responsibility, with aesthetic value and political valency, with the vicissitudes of memory and historical documentation, and with questions of family, home, and homelessness.

Langston Hughes in Context

The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with Hughes' at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.

Founded in Fiction

An original account of the importance of diverse forms of fiction in the early American republic--one that challenges the "rise of the novel" narrative.

Free Indirect

Develops a new theory of the novel for the twenty-first century. In the works of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, James Kelman, W. G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith, Timothy Bewes identifies a mode of thought that he calls "free indirect," in which the novel's refusal of prevailing ideologies can be found.

Watch Your Language

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal and allegorical literary development....Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language.

Aztec Antichrist

Presents a transcription, translation, and study of two sixteenth-century Nahuatl religious plays that are likely the earliest surviving presentations of the Antichrist legend in the Americas, and possibly the earliest surviving play scripts in the whole of the New World in any language.

The Necromantics

Dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses--monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified--that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present's desire to remake the past in its own image.

Critical Insights: the Brontë Sisters

This volume closely examines Charlotte's masterpiece Jane Eyre, Emily's influential Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to give readers a deeper sense of the themes throughout these important works and the influences behind their creation.

Critical Insights: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Explores Emerson's vast literary and social impact during his lifetime as well as his legacy beyond "Self-Reliance." Emerson's other writings are discussed in relation to famous literary works and in relation to the themes of nationhood, oratory, social reform, spiritual education, and the environment.

Assembled for Use

A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary look at Native American literature through non-narrative texts like lists, albums, recipes, and scrapbooks.

Ain't I an Anthropologist

Considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston's popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions.