Welcome to your course guide.
Here you will find tools and resources to help you engage in research for your course, but don't forget the library has many many resources that are all available to your as Villanova students. Although the resources on this page are specific to your current class your understanding of how to use these resources can be applied to other library resources for other classes in the future.
Other Helpful Library Pages
For a comprehensive list of the databases available to you through the library see
Databases A-Z
Search Smarter!
Avoid Problem Areas
Harvard Guide to Using Sources:
What Constitutes Plagiarism? Under the section labeled as online tutorials there are tutorials you can take to help you better understand academic integrity and how to avoid plagiarism.
Critical Articles
MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO)Provides citations to journal articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations on all aspects of literature, language and linguistics, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, and folklore. International in scope; coverage from 1926 to the present. Includes access to the MLA Directory of Periodicals.
Drama Criticism (Gale)Provides critical analyses of significant dramatists or plays. For each play or playwright featured, a full range of critical opinion is presented, along with a biographical sketch, a chronological list of the writer's major works and more. Approximately 90-95% of critical essays are full text. Titles of the plays are searchable. Reprints also available from Literature Resource Center.
JSTORProvides a full text archive of academic journals and books in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. The most recent three to five years of a journal are usually not included.
Resources for Textual Analysis
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press)Contains the complete text of the second edition of the 20-volume Dictionary. Presents authoritative information on words in the English language, including their form, definition, history, pronunciation, and etymology. Approximately 1,000 new and revised entries are added on a quarterly basis.
Open Source Shakespeare (Shakespeare Concordance)Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free Web site containing Shakespeare's complete works. It is intended for scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind. Of particular interest on this site is the Concordance where you can search for words or phrases across Shakespeare's complete works.
A variorum is a work that collates all known variants of a text. It is a work of textual criticism, whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication.
Shakespeare's WordsThe site integrates the full text of the plays and poems with the entire Glossary database, allowing you to search for any word or phrase in Shakespeare's works, and in particular to find all instances of all words that can pose a difficulty to the modern reader.
Early English Books Online (ProQuest) Tutorial
Provides access to digital page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473 to 1700. Includes books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and newspapers. For searchable text of selected titles see Early English Books Online -Text Creation Partnership.
Streaming Video
Digital Theatre PlusProvides access to a streaming video collection of current British theatre productions. Includes behind-the-scenes documentaries, and teaching and learning resources with detailed introductions, plot summaries, character biographies, relationship maps, language analysis, scene studies, performance backgrounds, and historical contexts.
Resource Tutorials
Follow the link above to access the EEBO record for Shakespeare's First Folio (Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies Publishedaccording to the true originall copies), then from the top navigation select "Full Text." You will be redirected to a warning page about viewing the full text, from this page select "Table of Contents," then go directly to "As You Like It" or individual sections of the play.
The First Folio contains the earliest extant version of As You Like It , but the original date of its composition has been determined to be between 1598 and 1600.
Organizing Your Sources
Below you will find a variety of resources for organization and citation.
Zotero
Zotero is a free, open source citation tool developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for New Media at George Mason University. It’s been funded by the Mellon and Sloan foundations, as well as the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Download Zotero
Organize and save your sources, return to them quickly, create bibliographies and works cited, organize group projects, and do in text citations.
ZoteroBib
ZoteroBib helps you build a bibliography instantly from any computer or device, without creating an account or installing any software.
Word processor plug-ins for Zotero
YouTube video about adding in text citations
MLA Style Guide
MLA Handbook 9th Edition.
Available at the Falvey's front reference desk
The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and they provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.
