ENCYCLOPEDIAS, DICTIONARIES, AND HANDBOOKS

Encyclopedias and Handbooks give you an overview of a subject. Scholars often begin with one of these for broad background information.

Harmon, William. A Handbook to Literature . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. This is a general handbook which defines genres, allusions, movements, literary terms. Based on the 1936 classic by William Thrall and Addison Hibbard.   Ref. PN41 .H355 2003

A few examples of more specialized handbooks and encyclopedias include:
Francophone Literatures : a Literary and Linguistic Companion
The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature
Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French

We also have many French-English Dictionaries ,Grammars, Verb Guides , and Audio Materials.

BOOKS

Skyline lets you find books and other materials in our library. For a more extensive search of books, try the Worldcat database.

ARTICLES

The primary article resources for language, linguistics and literature are MLA and LLBA , which you can search simultaneously.

Click here to access additional article databases for French language and literature.

GENRE SPECIFIC INDEXES

Granger's is an index to poetry.

Interplay   An internet index to plays in collections, anthologies and periodicals. This allows you to search for a play that has not been published separately, but is available in a collection.  

Click here to find indexes for dissertations and theses .

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Biographies give information about the life and works of an author.

Contemporary Authors A bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields. Provides complete biographical and bibliographical references for more than 90,000 authors in the U.S. and around the world.  There is a large printed version of Contemporary Authors located at REF PN771.C622 (Detroit: Gale).

Dictionary of Literary Biography . Detroit: Gale, 1978-  . Ref PS129.D47 A multivolume set which contains biographical and critical sketches of authors from all countries and eras. Each volume has a theme and includes authors with a genre or time period in common. Entries are arranged alphabetically by author. Every volume contains a cumulative index to the prior volumes. Click here to find the volumes containing French Authors.

There are many additional biographical directories that compile authors with common gender or ethnicity. Below are just a few examples: