WHERE AND HOW TO FIND
SECONDARY LITERATURE
In the age of the Internet, it is necessary to preface a chapter on secondary literature with a few words of caution. Without doubt, the Internet has revolutionized and simplified the search for information in many everyday situations. However, despite its obvious advantages, this new tool is of limited service for literary studies, and it is important to be aware of these limitations before using the Internet as a source for scholarly research. Only a very small percentage of scholarly works, such as certain primary texts, monographs, or articles, are accessible on the Internet; most are still published solely in print. Even though there are journals that appear in an additional electronic version, many of them are available online for registered users only (i.e., your university has to subscribe to the specific service). The same holds true for other large databases of primary literary texts. The consequence for literary scholars is that they still have to do the bulk of their research in libraries, not in cyberspace. If professors consider research papers with sources taken predominantly from the Internet to be amateurish and untrustworthy, this does not necessarily mean that they oppose current technological developments on principle. It is much more likely that their negative evaluation of a student's work is due to its lack of scholarly foundation and insufficient research into secondary sources for the paper.
Another mistake could be that you do not properly evaluate the quality of an Internet resource. Assessing online secondary material is difficult not only for the beginner but also for advanced students or researchers. In general, you can apply the following basic rules for evaluation: If the article you find on the Internet comes from a major database, such as Project Muse or JSTOR, you can be almost certain that the text you retrieve is, in principle, very likely to be a good source. These large databases give online access to several hundred scholarly journals in the field, most of which are also available in printed form from major university presses. Almost all of these journals are peer-reviewed, which means, first of all, they have a general editor and an editorial board vouching for the quality of the articles. If you find articles on the Internet outside of these major journal databases, look for the same criteria: an editor or editorial board, guaranteeing the quality and high standards of the publication, and, ideally, some indication that the article underwent a peer-reviewed process. In this case, the web source makes clear that the text passed through a process of evaluation by other scholars in the field before it was accepted for (online) publication. This information is usually stated prominently on the homepage, identifying the website or online journal as a “peer-reviewed” or “refereed” source.
Finding secondary material is one of the first steps in preparing to write a research or term paper. Such projects, like any scholarly analysis of literary works, should ideally open a new perspective, cast light on a hitherto neglected aspect of a text, and establish a connection with the state of current research in the field. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to consult the existing secondary literature for available material on a certain topic, text, or author. The works of previous researchers in a field influence your own work by providing insights related to your topic and thus possibly supporting your particular arguments, or by delineating the boundaries of your topic. In some cases, a certain topic may have been sufficiently dealt with or treated in much the same way as you have in mind. In such instances, it is necessary to rethink the entire approach or, in the worst case, abandon the project entirely.
But what are the characteristics of a well-researched scholarly paper? Most term papers for college or university courses require a clear-cut topic, focusing on a certain aspect of a text or author. When doing research for a lower-level seminar paper, it is usually sufficient to consult the subject index of the departmental or university library catalogue for the monographic (i.e., book-length) secondary literature on a certain topic. For more elaborate projects — such as master's theses, dissertations, and essays to be published in scholarly journals — it is necessary to compile as complete a list of secondary literature as possible. In these advanced research projects, it is important to incorporate the results of other researchers and to ensure that one's own findings are original and hitherto unpublished.
Secondary sources include articles and essays, and book reviews, as well as “notes” (very short essays on a narrowly defined topic), which are all predominantly published in scholarly journals. As with other academic fields of research, literature journals publish the latest and most up-to-date results in article form. Essays or articles are often collected in “anthologies,” which focus on a specific topic, mostly compiled and published by an editor. A collection of essays in honor of a well-known scholar is called a Festschrift. A book-length publication, usually by one author, dealing with one specific topic only, goes by the term monograph. Most dissertations and scientific publications in a university context can be attributed to this latter group.
Each philology (i.e., the study of the literature and linguistics of a particular language) has bibliographical reference books or databases that can be used to search for further literature. For the study of all modern languages, such as German and Romance languages, and, in particular, for literatures in English, the MLA International Bibliography, compiled by the Modern Language Association (MLA), is the standard reference work. This bibliography has been on the market since 1921 and indexes several thousand new pieces of secondary literature published every year.
Most large university and departmental libraries have the MLA International Bibliography in its printed edition and additionally provide access to the accompanying online database. In order to find out what has been published on the novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood, for example, all you have to do is enter the name of the author together with the title of the literary text or a subject keyword, and the result page will list all entries of secondary literature on the required item. Overleaf is a sample entry for the above online search on Margaret Atwood. The abbreviations on the left margin stand for: TI = title, AU = author(s), SO = source, IS = International Standard Serial Number, LA = language, PT = publication type, PY = publication year, DE = descriptors.
TI: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Contextual Dystopia AU: Ketterer,-David SO: Science-Fiction-Studies (SFS), Greencastle, IN. 1989 July; 16(2 (48)): 209–217. IS: 0091-7729 LA: English PT: journal-article PY: 1989 DE: Canadian-literature; 1900–1999; Atwood, -Margaret; The-Handmaid's-Tale; novel-; dystopian-novel; treatment of historicity
The individual references of the MLA Bibliography contain rudimentary information about the contents and topic of the secondary text; most importantly, however, they provide the dates and references you will need for the successful retrieval of secondary literature (which can either be essays or book-length studies). In the example above, the title (TI) of the essay (“Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Contextual Dystopia”) is mentioned first, then the name of the author (AU) of the essay (Ketterer, David), followed by the name of the journal or anthology (SO) where the essay was published (Science Fiction Studies) together with the year, volume, and page numbers of the journal (1989 July; 16 (2 [48]): 209–217). For book publications, the place of publication and the publisher are also listed. In addition, the field descriptor (DE) provides brief information about the content and topic of the secondary text. These keywords offer a first quick insight into the relevance of a secondary text to your own research.
If your library does not subscribe to the online version of the MLA Bibliography, you will have to consult the printed edition. This can be very time-consuming, since you have to check every annual volume of the bibliography individually. The Subject Index of the printed bibliography permits you to search for secondary literature on a variety of topics, including subjects such as “feminist literary criticism,” “detective fiction,” or “utopias.” The Author Index is divided into national literatures and periods, listing the secondary literature that has been published on individual literary texts in the course of a certain year. For example, in order to search for articles and books published on the novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) by the English author Virginia Woolf, you have to look up the section “English literature” and the further subdivision “contemporary” in the individual annual volumes. Under the author's name, you will find a list of secondary sources published in that year on Woolf s respective literary works. Here is a sample search result from the 1956 volume:
Baldanza, Frank. “Clarissa Dalloway' s ‘Party
Consciousness.’” MFS, 11, 24–30.
If you need a complete list of secondary literature about an author or text, it is necessary to consult all annual volumes by repeating the process described above. The MLA International Bibliography goes back to the year 1921 — in our example, you would have to check the volumes from 1925 onward, since Woolf s Mrs Dalloway was published in that year.
Although the MLA International Bibliography is the most comprehensive reference work for modern languages and literatures and is usually sufficient for the needs of the beginner, it does not, of course, list all published items of secondary literature. Therefore, many university libraries offer facilities that grant the researcher additional access to extensive international, computerized databases and bibliographies. This complex search method is of little interest to the beginner and probably only worthwhile in the context of a larger research project, such as a thesis or dissertation.
An easy and fast way to find book-length studies on a specific topic that are not included in the online version of the MLA International Bibliography is to use the online catalogues of large research libraries such as the Library of Congress or the British Library. Most universities also provide links to catalogues such as Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) or Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is also referred to as OCLC WorldCat. These networks allow you to screen a large number of international library catalogues simultaneously by simply filing one search. The program then systematically checks the different library holdings for the requested keywords.
For larger research projects that require complete — or nearly so — lists of secondary literature, it is indispensable to consult other printed or computerized general bibliographical sources or reference works that specialize in certain areas. The best guidebook to these sources is James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 5th ed. (New York: The Modern Language Association, 2008).
Once you have found references to secondary literature in the MLA Bibliography (or any other standard reference work), you can begin to search for this material in the departmental or university library. If it is necessary to use books or journals that are not available at your home institution, there is the option of ordering them at the main university library through the interlibrary loan system. Moreover, certain articles that you come across during your research may be available online. In such cases, you should definitely make use of these sources and cite them in your paper as electronic documents. How these and other types of secondary material are documented correctly in a scholarly paper will be the focus of the next chapter.