English 130

A lot of good scholarship is published in books, and it’s often less specialized than what you’ll find in articles. Thus, books are worth exploring. Note that you do not have to read the entire book – it may have just a chapter or section of interest.

Note that search terms that work in the databases MAY NOT work when searching for books.  The catalog depends on subject headings which describe the book, rather than searching the book itself, so you have to  make sure you are using the right words. See below for advice on this. 

Subject Headings

Subject headings describe what a book is about and are consistent throughout the catalog.  They are very useful when it comes to searching for research.

There are certain patterns for the kinds of things that show up as subject headings:

• People (including authors!) by name, last name first.
• Literary movements
• Themes --but these are somewhat inconsistent, so you should try a keyword search first to see how it is phrased

If you know the heading, you can search using subject begins with.

These searches bring up lists, showing what the books on this topic is about. For instance, if you search for Morrison, Toni, you will see something like this:

This list goes on much longer.  It's a good idea to look through and see whether any of the subheadings are relevant to your paper. 

If you want to search more specifically, you can use the Advanced Search. This allows you to combine search types, so you can combine your Subject search with a normal search to search within that subject. 

Other Subject Headings

If you want books about a movement or a theme rather than an author and her works, there are subject headings for that, too, but they are a little more difficult to predict.

Here are the sorts of things that are usually subject headings.

• Literary movements, like Theater of the Absurd or Transcendentalism.  Big movements, like Romanticism and Modernism, may be broken down more specifically.  Romanticism in literature is a little more useful than just Romanticism.
• Literature of countries, broken down by time periods (for instance: American literature -- 17th century)
• Certain themes in literature. For instance: Racism in literature, Children in literature, or Mental illness in literature.  Note that it's difficult to predict which of these headings will exist, so you may need to do a keyword search first to find them.