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English Literature

Key Indexing Resources (some have partial full text content included)

RU Library Search Everything This search engine searches for books and audio-visual materials that are also listed in the library's catalogue, as well as journal articles (chiefly those that are available electronically), theses and dissertations, newspaper coverage from some recent and a selection of archival newspapers, and digitized content such as out-of-copyright books and journals that are available from sources such as The Internet Archive and The Hathi Trust.

Using Basic Search Everything Video

If you want to try a more focused search restricted to databases emphasizing English Literature, try the following resources:

Canadian Book Trade Bibliography, 1935-1985 = Bibliographie sur le commerce du livre au Canada, 1935-1985

This resource indexes about 300 print resources including Quill & Quire.

Key Databases

Early English Book Online (EEBO)
Early English Books Online (EEBO) The aim of the Early English Books Online Project is to capture the earliest extant edition of every English-language work published during the first two centuries of printing in England, and converting this material into fully-searchable texts. Over 25,000 texts from the first phase of EEBO-TCP have been made freely available as open data in the public domain from January 2015.)

Drama Collections including Film Scripts

Many additional plays, film scripts, and dvds of theatrical productions can be found in the RU Library Catalogue.

Resources focusing on Theatrical Studies

See also the RU Library guide for Theatre

Google Scholar

What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly and peer reviewed literature. From one search box, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites

As of March 2015, Wikipedia reported that approximately 160 million documents were indexed by Google Scholar. Coverage of topics in Google Scholar varies from discipline to discipline as many journal publishers do not allow Google to index their articles; in many cases searching subject specific databases will result in a better choice of articles.

If you are searching with Google Scholar on-campus you will automatically be given access to articles for which Ryerson has a subscription.  If you are using Google Scholar off-campus, you will need to configure Google Scholar to get access to those articles.

Configuring Google Scholar for Off-campus Use

For Google Scholar to know that you are affiliated with Ryerson (and that you should have access to Ryerson resources), you will need to configure your Google Scholar Preferences as follows:

  1. Go to scholar.google.ca and click on the Settings icon
  2. Choose Library Links from the left-hand menu
  3. Enter Ryerson in the search box
  4. Click in the box beside Ryerson University Get it! @ Ryerson
  5. Scroll down and click on the Save Preferences button

Once configured, you will see Get It! @ Ryerson links when you search Google Scholar and you will have access to all Ryerson's subscription resources.

Google Scholar Chrome Extension

Chrome users can install the Google Scholar Button to make finding articles and formating citations easy.  You can use it to:

  • Find full text of articles
  • Re-do your web search on Google Scholar
  • Format references in APA, MLA or Chicago style and copy them into your paper.

To take full advantage of the Google Scholar Button when off-campus, remember to configure your Google Scholar settings so that it knows you are from Ryerson and provides access to Ryerson subscribed resources.

Creative Commons License

This guide has been created by the Ryerson University Library and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License unless otherwise marked.

Creative Commons Attribution License
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