Literary Criticism: Websites

IPL Literary Criticism

The Literary Criticism Collection brings together hundreds of critical and biographical sites with annotations. It is international in scope, but emphasizes authors from North America, the British Isles, and the former British Empire. The collection is arraged by author, title, and nationality/literary period.

Author Links

Browse or search this comprehensive site by author name to find short biographies and links to additional web resources. Covers a wide range of authors from all literary periods.

Literary History

Calling itself "A survey of 19th century and 20th century literature," this site indexes by period, theme and author.

The Victorian Web: Authors

If you have an author who was active during the Victorian period, click on his or her name and find a wealth of author and literature resources.

The Modern Word

If your author wrote during the modern period, you may find him or her here.

Using websites found on search engines such as Google or Bing? Evaluate your findings for Authority, Currency, Objectivity, Coverage and Accuracy.

Authority

• Is an author listed?
• What are his/her credentials
• Can I contact him/her?
• Is the page published by a particular institution?
• Are they respected?
• What does the url tell you?

Currency

• When was the page published?
• Is it being maintained? Has it been updated recently?
• Are there any broken links?

Objectivity

• Does the publishing body have bias?
• Does the author have bias?
• Are both sides of arguments presented?

Coverage

• Does the author cite his/her information sources?
• Are these sources authentic?
• Is information missing?
• Is information organized and formatted well?
• Who is the intended audience?
• Is this website appropriate for my level of research?

Accuracy

• Are there misspellings or grammatical errors?
• Do you notice other errors?

Try using the Boolean Operators you learned for databases in a search engine.

Find websites evaluated by librarians at:

INFOMINE

Internet Public Library

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