Libraries

MLA BIBLIOGRAPHY DATABASE

(for articles in literature & language)

The Modern Language Association, or MLA, indexes criticism of literature, folklore and linguistics from all over the world (but not from ancient Greece and Rome). It also indexes some material on language teaching. It covers over 4,000 journals and many book chapters and doctoral dissertations, back to the 1960s. The result is the printed MLA International Bibliography, a set of annual volumes organized by nationality and period and classified further into authors and their works. The Dobbs library owns most of these volumes, but only the “Classified Authors” from 1990 on.

Mercy also offers the contents of this bibliography as an online database.

Remember that it indexes sources without providing abstracts or full text. But some of the journals are available full-text through JSTOR or elsewhere. In addition, Mercy owns about 20% of the journals MLA cites in American literature, and 10% in English literature. Others are available on interlibrary loan for free, normally within 2 weeks.

To use MLA, start on our webpage, www.mercy.edu/libraries, then choose: “Articles/Indexes/Databases” >> “Literature and Language”

In the Keyword box and perhaps the Author as Subject box you may enter a couple of words/names to define your search. KEEP IT SIMPLE and check your SPELLING!

Just the author’s name and title of a work (and/or name of a character) is usually enough.

MLA adds very few subject headings anyway, and many critical articles deal with several aspects of a work at once.

Sample search:

Suppose you need criticism on Stephen Crane’s short story “The Blue Hotel.”

You’ve already checked our standard sources in Reference, and have looked up books about Stephen Crane’s work.

On MLA’s keyword box you could enter: blue hotel

or: Crane and blue hotel

In either case you’ll retrieve over 50 “entries,” listed roughly from most recent to oldest.

Most typical are the journal articles, like this one:

Feaster, John: “Violence and the Ideology of Capitalism: A Reconsideration of Crane’s ‘Blue Hotel,’” American Literary Realism, (25:1), 1992 Fall, p.74-94

-- where (25:1) means Vol 25, No. 1 of the journal American Literary Realism.

Note that these citations (oddly enough) are not given in MLA format, but the elements you need for crediting the source are all there.

(For MLA format see “Writing/Citation Guides” at the bottom of the library’s web page.)

On the results screen the article title is given in blue; clicking on it will give you its subject headings – and not much more.

To obtain the article, first look up the journal name in our online Periodicals Locator, and see if we have it full-text, or on paper or microfilm.

On MLA you occasionally see a small icon to the left of the citation, saying “JSTOR”; when it’s there you can click the icon and bring up the article full-text from our JSTOR Literature database.

MLA also includes books and book chapters. A whole book is cited as one title with publisher and year. If the title is followed by “In……..[authors] [title in Italics] it is actually a chapter in a book. In that case the italicized part is the book title, which you can look up in our catalog to see if we have it. We usually do not, so remember our interlibrary loan service for anything we don’t own.

MLA also includes dissertations, but we can only provide you with the abstract. Normally we try to get a dissertation on interlibrary loan only per faculty request.

dr/10-06