Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

BHS Library has an excellent collection of casebooks as well as many volumes of Contemporary Literary Criticism. But the web offers access to literary criticism, particularly of newer writers, that we just can’t offer in print. But web-crit (okay, I just made that up, but I am hoping it will stick) is a dicey business, particularly if you are an easily suggestible teenager. There are a lot of great online book review sources.

Rutgers Literary Resources on the Net - "This set of pages is a collection of links to sites on the Internet dealing especially with English and American literature, excluding most single electronic texts, and is limited to collections of information useful to academics — I've excluded most poetry journals, for instance." according to site creator Jack Lynch, PhD.

ReviewsOfBooks is wonderful. It is a clearinghouse for full length newspaper and magazine reviews. It is not as comprehensive as I would like but in the words of Spencer Tracy “what’s there is cherce.”

Amazon will often reprint reviews from reputable sources like Library Journal or Publishers Weekly which can be convenient for less literary books.

Allreaders seemed like a good idea at the time, but it is useless for research. Everyone is referred to as a “resident scholar”. Which becomes increasingly more ironic the more of these reviews you read.