Black Studies 31/English 65 : Caribbean Literature
Fall 2003
LIBRARY CATALOGS | GENERAL BACKGROUND| LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIAS, BIBLIOGRAPHIES | JOURNAL ARTICLES | DICTIONARIES
Catalogs
The Amherst College Library’s books and
journals are listed in the Four-College Library Catalog which you can
consult at the workstations in the Library or, if you have a computer
and are connected to the campus network, directly from your room. The
University of Massachusetts Library has a separate, but linked, online
library catalog.
You can search in the library catalogs by
authors’ names (last name first), by subjects, by titles of books,
or by Keyword (words from titles, subjects, notes, but not authors’
names). Subject searching in the online catalog requires the exact
word or phrase chosen by libraries to define your topic. The five-volume
Library of Congress Subject Headings, on top of the bookshelf nearest
the Reference Desk, is a thesaurus of official library terminology. Some
useful general subject headings for this course are Caribbean Literature
(English), Caribbean Fiction, and West Indian Literature (English). Many
subject headings have subdivisions (Caribbean Fiction-History and Criticism,
for example); you can - and should - browse the subdivisions. Also, use
the catalogs interactively, that is, when you find a book which is relevant
to your research, check what subject headings have been assigned to it
(they're listed onscreen) and look for other material using that exact
subject heading as the search term.
To see if Amherst owns a journal, click
on the Journal Title option in the menu screen of the Four-College
Library Catalog, then type the journal's name.
For quick, general information, try the
Britannica Online;
(click on the colored link).
General Background
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures.
London & New York, Routledge, 2000. 3vols.
Short, alphabetically-arranged entries on
people, places, concepts, some with little lists of further reading. (Ref
F1406 E 515 2000)
Caribbean History in Maps. Trinidad & Jamaica, Longman, 1979.
(Ref G 1535 A8 1979)
Literary Encyclopedias, Bibliographies, Indexes
Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical
Sourcebook. New York, Greenwood, 1986.
Biographies and critical assessments of
50 major authors. (Ref PR 9205 F54 1986)
Caribbean Women Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography.
Westport CT, Greenwood, 1993.
Brief biographies of women writers (in all
the languages of the region), and references to critical treatments of
their work. (Ref Z 1595 C364 1993)
Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers.
Detroit, Gale, 1992--.
Biographies and bibliographies of works
by and about selected major writers. So far, three volumes have been published.
(Ref PR 9205 A52 T88)
Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English.
London & New York, Routledge, 1994.
A two-volume collection of brief articles
on individual writers and various topics, including recent theoretical
issues. (Ref PR 9080 A52 E53
Biography Resource Center
Over 400,000 electronically-available biographies
on nearly 275,000 people from a wide variety of sources brokered by the
Gale Research publishing company, including their CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS
series. Click on the colored link above.
MLA International Bibliography 1963-
A computerized listing of literary-critical
articles from 1963 to the present, available on the Library website (click
on the link above). Follow on-screen instructions. In looking for critiques
of a particular author, type in the author's last name first.
LEXIS-NEXIS
An electronic index to articles in a large
number of English-language newspapers in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere,
potentially useful for tracking down book reviews and author profiles
(click on the link above).
Index to Black Periodicals. New York, G.K. Hall,
1961--
A printed annual listing of articles, lately
more comprehensive than in earlier years; most recent volume covers 2001.
(Ref AI 3 O4)
Academic Search Premier and Expanded Academic Index
Relatively newly-available electronic resources
which index articles in a wide range of subjects, including literature,
many of which are linked to full-text versions of articles (click on the
links above).
A Few Words about Journal Articles
Printed
and computerized indexes and bibliographies provide citations to articles
which may or may not be owned by the Amherst College Library. To find
out if and where we have a backfile, you must look up each journal title
(not article titles or authors) in the Four-College Library Catalog. Be
attentive to volume numbers and dates which show up on-screen since sometimes
we've started or stopped a subscription in the middle of a run. Please
note: some older volumes of journals may be housed in the Amherst College
Depository, an off-campus storage facility. You can request volumes from
the Depository by clicking on 'Request Forms' on the righthand side of
the Library homepage; they will be delivered the next weekday.
Note too that the Library increasingly has
electronic full-text versions of articles available. In many computerized
indexes now you'll find a button - 'AC LINKS' - providing automatic connections
to electronic full-text if the Library has access, and pointers to other
potential sources, like the Library Catalogs, if we don't.
Dictionaries
When you are reading any literature, get in the habit of using a big dictionary like WEBSTER'S THIRD NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY or the RANDOM HOUSE UNABRIDGED. The magisterial OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (Ref PE 1625 O87 1989 in printed form) is also available online (click here: OED Online); it outlines historical changes in words' meanings, and includes words from various regions and dialects. Richard Allsopp's Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Ref PE 3304 D33 1996), Frederick Cassidy's DICTIONARY OF JAMAICAN ENGLISH (Ref PE 3313 Z5 C3 1980) and John A. Holm's DICTIONARY OF BAHAMIAN ENGLISH (Ref PE 3311 Z5 H64 1982) may also help with unfamiliar words.
Do you have questions about research in this course? Contact Michael Kasper