Literary Research and American Postmodernism: Strategies and Sources

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Literary Research and American Postmodernism is a guide to scholarly research in the field of American postmodern literature, which this volume defines as the period between 1950 and 1990. This work aims to provide advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars of literature with a comprehensive view of the print and online resources available in literature and related subject areas. The volume offers best practices for research, especially for the challenges inherent to the field of American postmodernism, and provides scholars with a path toward success in their research endeavors. The opening chapters describe the state of academic research in the literary field and how to formulate an appropriate research topic, develop keywords, and use advanced search techniques to improve search results. One chapter is devoted to how to navigate library catalogs, read a catalog record, and locate materials in libraries worldwide. Subsequent chapters describe general reference resources, print and electronic bibliographies, and scholarly journals that focus on literature in the second half of the twentieth century. The author identifies resources for locating the book reviews and historical magazines and newspapers that can offer insight into the history of particular authors publications. The unique challenges and promises of archival research are outlined, along with tips for getting the most out of a trip to a special collections library to perform primary research. Web resources and techniques for finding scholarly resources on the Internet are addressed in addition to subscription-based or library-owned materials. The final chapter synthesizes the information described in the previous chapters by taking the reader through a real-life research question and demonstrating how a scholar might locate resources on a difficult topic. An appendix of resources in related fields suggests additional directions the researcher might explore.

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This guide to Literary Research and American Postmodernism will be useful to those who take the time to read through the approachable text and to educate themselves on literary research, as well as for anyone who dips in and out of the book for a guide or a database that may be useful at a given moment. * s *

Author Bio

Emily Witsell is a research librarian and coordinator of research and instruction at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. She holds an MLS from Indiana University and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia, where she specialized in the study of illness and medicine in contemporary literature.