Twentieth-century literature

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This guide has been designed as a starting point for research involving twentieth-century literature.

If you need help, please contact Ivana Niseteo, Liaison Librarian for English, French, French Programs (FASS), Global Humanities, Linguistics, and World Languages & Literatures at 778.782.6838 or iniseteo@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

Reference sources

  • Oxford Reference Online. Online versions of 100 general reference works plus material in language, science and medicine, humanities and social sciences, business, and professional areas.
  • Encyclopedia Britannica. An all-purpose online encyclopedia, including an online atlas, dictionary, and select journal articles.

 Reference sources are designed to help you find specific types of information quickly. For further tips and resources, see our Background reference sources page.

Encyclopedias and companions

  • The Oxford companion to twentieth-century literature in English [print or online].
  • Literary Encyclopedia. Provides authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics.
  • Cambridge companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald [print or online]
  • Cambridge companion to Virginia Woolf [print or online]
  • J.R.R. Tolkien encyclopedia: scholarship and critical assessment [print]
  • The Cambridge companion to C.S. Lewis [print]
 Search for more by including the words encyclopedia OR dictionary OR handbook OR companion OR manual in your KEYWORD search (e.g. Wordsworth AND companion)

Dictionaries and literary terms

 

Biographical information

  • The Canadian who’s who [print]

Note: Individual years are available as ebooks, search for them by doing a title search.

 

  • Literary lives [print]
  • The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club [print or online]
  • The fellowship: the literary lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams [print]
  • A dab of Dickens & a touch of Twain: literary lives from Shakespeare’s old England to Frost’s New England [print]

Quotations

  • Quotable women of the twentieth century [print]
  • The Oxford dictionary of twentieth century quotations [print]

Literary criticism      

  • MLA International Bibliography. Contains scholarly articles on English literature, linguistics, language and folklore.
  • Literature Online. Contains works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.
  • Oxford Bibliographies Online. Online index to bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation with a bibliographical essay on sources.
  • Literature Criticism Online. Full text access to six major Gale literary criticism series, covering literature from 1400 to the present.
  • Project MUSE Search. Full text access to the back files of Humanities and Social Science Journals; Good English Literature content.
  • JSTOR. Full text access to the back files of Humanities and Social Science Journals; Good English Literature content. Note the most recent 2-5 years are excluded.

Primary sources

  • Historical Newspapers . Full page and article images of historical newspapers including:
    • The New York Times (1851 to 4 years ago)
    • The Wall Street Journal (1889 to 18 years ago)
    • The Washington Post (1877 to 7 years ago)
  • Globe & Mail Canada's Heritage from 1844. Includes major events in Canadian history, plus thousands of images, advertisements, and political cartoons dating back to the pre-confederation era.
  • British Colonist. This website contains all the issues of the British Colonist (also called The Daily British Colonist, the Daily Colonist, and other variants) from its first issue in 1858 to December 1920 (Victoria, BC).
  • Google News Archive. An extension of Google News that provides access to scanned archives of newspapers.

For additional primary sources, take a look at SFU Library’s Primary Sources for the Humanities guide.

Images & film

SFU Library has a comprehensive guide for finding images within SFU subscribed databases and online, including how to properly cite images in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats.

For sound recordings and performances available on video/DVD at the library, search the SFU Catalogue for the title of the work, and limit to the appropriate material type using the drop down menu to the right of the search box.

Related topics

Theatre

  • Worlds, bodies, matters: theatre of the late twentieth century [print]
  • Naturalism in theatre: its development and legacy [print]
  • Theatre in theory, 1900-2000: an anthology [print]
  • Modernism and performance: Jarry to Brecht [print]
  • Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) Contains early modern plays and playwrights with additional information such as genre, dates of first publication and production.
  • Records of Early English Drama (REED): Patrons and Performances. Designed to include a wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom.

History     

  • America: History and Life. Indexes literature on all aspects of U.S. and Canadian history, culture and current affairs.
  • Essays on twentieth-century history [print]
  • A short history of the twentieth century [print or online]
  • The twentieth-century world and beyond: an international history since 1900 [print]
  • Bibliography of British & Irish History. An authoritative guide to what has been written from the Roman period to the present day.
  • Historical Abstracts. Indexes journal articles, book reviews, dissertations on the history of the world outside of Canada & the United States.
  • British History Online. Contains some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.

Religion

  • The sixties and beyond: dechristianization in North America and Western Europe 1945-2000 [print].
  • The changing face to Christianity: Africa, the West, and the world.
  • Exporting the American gospel: global Christian fundamentalism [print]
  • The Bible in English. A collection of 20 different versions of the English Bible from the tenth to the twentieth century, including 12 full Bibles, 5 New Testament texts, 2 versions of the Gospels only, and William Tyndale's translations of the Pentateuch, Jonah and the New Testament.
  • ATLA Religion Database. Indexes journal articles on all aspects of religion and theology, including church and religious history.

Additional sources

  • Project Gutenberg. Provides access to over 33,000 downloadable e-books.
  • Oxford Text Archive. Develops, collects, catalogues and preserves electronic literary and linguistic resources for use in research, teaching and learning.
  • Representative Poetry Online. Includes English poems by 500 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today.
  • Centre for Early Modern Studies. From Oxford University, a central forum for research, conferences, and graduate study.