Database of the Week - Literary Reference Center

If you need to access quality literary criticism or primary sources for a paper, the Literary Reference Center is a one stop research database for comprehensive material from antiquity to the present day. The Literary Reference Center is a helpful online research tool for locating information about a writer, finding criticism about an author or a particular work of literature, and identifying specific date ranges for literary figures, movements, and historical events. The LRC also contains full text poems and short stories.

LRC provides information from over 1,000 books and monographs, major literary encyclopedias and reference works, hundreds of literary journals, and unique sources not available anywhere else. The Literary Reference Center provides full text access to more than 10,000 plot summaries, synopses, and work overviews; 75,000 articles of literary criticism; 130,000 author biographies; full text of more than 300 literary journals; 500,000 book reviews; 25,000 classic and contemporary poems; over 11,000 classic and contemporary short stories; full text of more than 7,500 classic novels over 3,000 author interviews; and over 1,000 images of literary figures.

LRC is available both on and off campus to current FSU students, faculty and staff.

You can search LRC by author, title, or keyword or choose the advance search function to do a more refined search. Search results can be sorted by document type: biographies, literary criticism, plot summaries, reviews, interviews, reference books, periodicals, poems, short stories, and images. The LRC also provides a glossary that you can use to look up literary terms. The ease of locating a variety of full text literature resources makes LRC a great online research database.

Denise Bosselman, Bibliographic Instruction/Distance Education Librarian