Literature
Some students find writing essays about literature more difficult than writing essays on other topics. In part, this is because writing about literature usually involves not only analysis but interpretation. Also, many students are unfamiliar with the terminology for discussing literature or are uncomfortable with the style of language of older literature. The resources below may help students in finding research for a particular writer or in understanding and appreciating literature in general.
Your best resource for literary research, analysis, and interpretation is the Chattanooga State Augusta R. Kolwyck Library. While the Internet can be a useful resource for many research projects, there are currently very few credible or reliable Internet resources for literary analysis and interpretation. Fortunately, the library has a wealth of resources from books on individual writers to extensive collections of reference works like Poetry Criticism or Poetry Explication. The library also offers students access to a variety of databases such as Literature Resource Center and MagillOnLiterature. The reference librarians may even have prepared an assignment guide for your teacher's research assignment, or they may have created a subject guide specifically for your literary figure or for the genre or time period of literature you are researching. For instance, the library has subject guides for African American Literature, Classical Literature, Literary Research, and Shakespeare. And the Reference page has links to MLA documentation resources for when you are required to use sources for a paper.
You may also want to visit other parts of the Reading & Writing Center web site, particularly the research, reference, and writing sections, for help in writing about literature.
While the Internet is not the best source for scholarly articles on literature, it can be useful for finding a text copy or facsimile of a literary work, or an audio or video reading of a literary work. So while you probably will not find articles about Moby Dick, you may be able to find a copy of the novel.
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