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Michelle Oswell, Humanities Librarian for Music and Literature (HC)

Sections:

Reference works
Journals
Secondary sources
Primary sources

Related Subjects:

English Literature

Databases A-Z:

Other:

FREN306 : Philosophes et Romantiques: Perspectives Interdisciplinaires (HC)

Reference works:

Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires de langue française

Author: Beaumarchais, Jean-Pierre de. Couty, Daniel.

Publisher: Paris : Bordas, c1994-

Europe 1450 to 1789

Online subject encyclopedia for early modern Europe with an emphasis on cultural history. Useful entries include: "Museums," "Marvels and Wonders," and "Salons." The bibliographies at the ends of articles are good places to find more information.

Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris

Author: Hillairet, Jacques, 1886-1984.

Publisher: Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1997.

Two-volume encyclopedia on the hitory of Paris's streets. Quite comprehensive, with a general introduction on Paris, and then alphabetical by street name. An index in the back refers to the old names of streets that have changed names.

Historical dictionary of the French Revolution 1789-1799

Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1985.

These next three are part of a set of historical dictionaries of France. Entries are arranged alphabetically and include important dates, people, events, and concepts from the time. Use for background information on historical topics, the bibliographies are dated.

Historical dictionary of Napoleonic France, 1799-1815

Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1985.

Historical dictionary of France from the 1815 restoration to the Second Empire

Publisher: New York : Greenwood Press, c1987.

A critical dictionary of the French Revolution

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

Good historical encyclopedia arranged topically into four large categories: Events, Actors (people), Institutions & Creations, and Ideas. If you don't see a specific article on your topic, try looking in the index. You'll find largish articles on Montesquieu and Roussea here, along with interesting essays on the Revolutionary Calendar, the Terror, etc. Each essay has a bibliography at the end, again, a little dated.

Dictionnaire de l'Ancien Régime

Publisher: Paris : Presses universitaires de France, c1996.

French-language dictionary on the Ancient Regime, arranged alphabetically.

Dictionnaire historique de la langue française

Publisher: Paris : Dictionnaires Le Robert, c1998.

Three volume historical dictionary along the lines of the Oxford English Dictionary. Gives word definitions, etymology, and dates of usage.

Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècl

Author: Larousse, Pierre, 1817-1875.

Publisher: Paris : Larousse et Boyer, 1866-[90]

19th century dictionary/encyclopedia by Larousse. Has historical, linguistic, biographic, scientific, literary, etc. definitions in 17 volumes.

Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris

Author: Fierro, Alfred.

Publisher: Paris : R. Laffont, c1996.

Good reference source on Paris, split into several sections: Events, the activities of Parisians, a chronology, a nice topical bibliography, and an index. There is an English translation of this dictionary, but it's quite abridged, so if possible you should use this edition.

Journals:

Yale French studies

Holdings:
(Bryn Mawr College) Available from 1948-2005.
(Haverford College) Available from 1948-2005.
(Swarthmore College) Available from 1948-2005.

Publisher: New Haven, Conn. : Yale French Studies,

SVEC

To browse through articles in SVEC you can either go to Bryn Mawr (which has most volumes) and leaf through the issues in person, or you can use MLA. To search just in SVEC in MLA, you need to choose advanced search and then under Series Title type SVEC. This will pull up all the articles indexed in MLA from SVEC. Of course, you could always add a keyword if you wanted to narrow things down a bit.

To search for earlier volumes (SVEC was previously called Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), click here. To search MLA for Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, enter that title into the Journal field in the standard search screen. There will be more than two thousand results, so I highly suggest adding a keyword.

Romantisme.

Publisher: [Paris] Flammarion.

Eighteenth-century studies

Holdings:
(Bryn Mawr College) Available from 1967-present.
(Haverford College) Available from 1967-present.
(Swarthmore College) Available from 1967-present.

Publisher: Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press.

French studies

Holdings:
(Bryn Mawr College) Available from 1996-present.
(Haverford College) Available from 1996-present.
(Swarthmore College) Available from 1996-present.

Publisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for French Studies.

Philosophy and literature

Holdings:
(Bryn Mawr College) Available from 1995-present.
(Haverford College) Available from 1995-present.
(Swarthmore College) Available from 1995-present.

Publisher: Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press,

Romanic review.

Publisher: New York, The Columbia University Press.

Secondary sources:

Literature resource center

Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors. This is the place to go for basic biographical information on authors.

MLA international bibliography

Provider: ProQuest

Provides citations to journal articles, books, working papers, conference proceedings, bibliographies, and other materials. Areas covered include literature, language, linguistics, film, theatre and folklore. Covers 1926-present.

The MLA is the best place to go if you're looking for journal articles or essays in books about literature. Like Tripod, you can do a basic keyword search, or you can narrow your searches down by using some more advanced techniques.

Using the standard search for MLA. From here you can do a keyword search, such as "hamlet" and "memory" The results will tell you every time the combination of those two search terms appeared in the database. Beware the "Title Keyword" search: this searches keywords in the titles of critical works, not literary works.

Use the

button to find out if we have the cited reference in the Trico. A separate window will open up and either take you directly to an electronic version of the article, give you a link to check Tripod for a print copy, or tell you we don't have a copy. If we don't have a copy, don't worry! You can request most things from Interlibrary Loan by clicking on the ILL link, entering your name and barcode and submitting the request.

There are other ways of searching MLA that come in handy. Try searching for "author as subject" or "author's work." But watch out! Not all titles are indexed specifically as "author's work" in MLA, but many are.

Cambridge companions online.

The Cambridge Companions Online include books (in pdf) on both Philosophy and Literature, making this an ideal place to look for information on all your authors.

Historical abstracts

Provider: EBSCO

Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, book reviews and dissertations that cover world history from 1450 to the present (excluding the U.S. and Canada which are covered in "America: History and Life"). Includes publications from 1953-present. Use this for topics that are more historical than literary in focus (for example, the history of Parisian salons).

There are two main ways you'll find journal articles:

1. You already have an article citation (say from a book you've read) and need to get the text of that article. For example, if I'm looking for the article "READING MORALS: LOCKE AND ROUSSEAU ON EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY" by Frances Ferguson in the 1984 volume of Representations (vol. 6, pp. 66-84), I would do the following:

Go to Tripod and do a journal title search for "Representations."
See that there are two results. Both the print and the online version say available from 1983-.
Choose the online version, then click on the link that corresponds to my school.
Choose the option in the Find It menu that reflects the correct date range (in this case, JSTOR)
Browse to the correct volume & page number I want.

2. You don't have the citation and you simply want to see what's available on your topic. There are a couple ways of doing this.

You can browse some of the likely journals in your area. Below are a few suggestions.
You can use a database to search for books & articles on your topic. Depending on the topic, you may want to use a literature database like MLA or a historical database like Historical Abstracts, or perhaps even an art database like Art INdex.

Primary sources:

ARTFL project

Provides full-text access to classical French writings. Includes literary works, political tracts, philosophical writings and technical treatises. Coverage varies. Full text of the Encyclopedie is searchable here.

Gallica Classique

Online collection of texts (some have images) from the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution

An English-language site from Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University. Includes many source documents from the revolutionary period that can be browsed or searched. You'll find primary source texts and images (art work & political cartoons, maps, and some cultural artifiacts like fans). Also take a look at the link at the bottom of the home page, Imaging the French Revolution. This site contains essays by scholars that analyze images and the ability to zoom in and really get a close look at some of these images.

Euro-Docs: History of France Primary Documents

A wiki with links to many online collections of primary source documents, including texts, pamphlets, and images.

L'histoire de l'image 1789-1939

A very nice site with digital images of art and iconography from the Revolution into the 20th century. You can search by theme, by date, or other details from the images' records. Each image has historical context and other information attached.

Early English books online.

Contains digital images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Includes books, pamphlets, manuscripts and newspapers.

Eighteenth Century collections online.

Offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 including books, pamphlets, almanacs, Bibles and treatises. Subjects covered include history, geography, fine arts, medicine, science, literature, language, religion, philosophy and law. Significant collections of women writers, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare are also included.