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Search: Criticism and Reference Search: TextsKeyword and Phrase SearchesExample 1 To find works containing the word suffragette or mentioning suffragettes:
This search will retrieves hits in such works as George Barlow's poem 'The Modern Woman' and Phoebe Hesketh's 'Violet at Ninety' (both under the Poetry tab), as well as William Dean Howells's The Mouse Trap and Jack London's Theft (both under the Drama tab). Tip: all Texts searches are exact searches (unless you use either the single-character or truncation wildcard, ? or *), so a search for the keyword suffragette alone will not pick up occurrences of the word suffragettes. Example 2 To find occurrences of the phrase handful of dust:
Tip: you don't need to use quotation marks when searching for phrases using the Texts search, except when your phrase contains the words and, or, not or near. Literature Online treats the words and, or, not or near as Boolean and proximity operators unless they form part of a phrase enclosed in quotation marks. This search retrieves T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land and Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama (both under the Poetry tab on the Texts: List of Results screen) as well as more than thirty other works containing this phrase. Example 3 To find plays featuring characters who are heiresses:
This search will retrieve occurrences of the word heiress in the cast and character lists of more than forty plays. It provides an instant list of characters falling into this category, such as Dora Sunnyside ('Only Daughter and Heiress to Sunnyside, a Southern Belle') from Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1866?) and Miranda ('An Heiress, worth Thirty Thousand Pound, really in Love with Sir George, but pretends to be so with her Guardian Sir Francis') from Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body: A Comedy (1709). This search could be refined further:
This search will retrieve only comedic or farcical plays by female dramatists with characters described as heiresses, including Aphra Behn's The City Heiress: Or, Sir Timothy Treat-All (1682). Alternatively, vary your search by looking for other types of character, using such keywords and search expressions as slave, fool, coxcomb, errand boy, vampire, foreigner (or foreign*), waif, rake, pander OR pimp, curtezan OR courtesan, detective, shrew, Pride, Gluttonie, etc. Boolean and Proximity Operators; Search HistoryExample 4a To explore the theme of hypnotism, mesmerism and 'animal magnetism' in the work of writers active during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
This search will retrieve all examples of words beginning hypno- or mesmer-, such as hypnosis, hypnotism, hypnotize, hypnotise, mesmeric, mesmerist and mesmerism, together with examples of the phrase animal magnetism and variations upon it such as Magnetisme Animal. More than 240 works are returned, including Bram Stoker's Dracula (which contains 35 hits and appears under the Prose tab) and Lewis Leopold's drama The Bells (31 hits, under Drama). Restricting this search to the work of eighteenth-century writers only would allow you to isolate some of the earliest appearances of these ideas in literary writing. Example 4b To perform a more focused search, retrieving only works with titles that allude to the theme of hypnotism, mesmerism or animal magnetism:
The results for this search include Poe's 'Mesmeric Revelation' from the first volume of his Tales (under the Prose tab), Browning's poem 'Mesmerism' (under the Poetry tab) and Mrs Inchbald's farce Animal Magnetism (under the Drama tab). Example 4c Alternatively, restrict your search according to the nationality of the author:
This search returns hits in works by North American writers active between 1800 and 1899, such as Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Augustin Daly, James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as many less-well-known writers. Example 4d To broaden and develop your research, you may wish to explore the usage of associated terms encountered when sifting through your previous results, such as galvanism:
This search retrieves passages from more than fifty poems, plays and novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Example 4e Finally, to pinpoint those works in which these themes and preoccupations coalesce, use the Search History function to combine searches already performed:
This combined search will retrieve only those works which satisfy both of the searches in question, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (under the Poetry tab), Disraeli's Coningsby, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas and Lydia Child's Letters from New York (all under Prose). Old Spellings and Typographical VariantsWherever possible Literature Online features the first authorised edition of any given literary work and preserves the spelling and punctuation of the source text exactly. Many historical texts feature archaic and irregular spelling, and users should be aware when searching that a single modern-spelling search term will not by itself retrieve all the relevant passages from historical texts. For example, the Keyword(s) search term melancholy will not retrieve occurrences of melancholye or melancolie in full text works. Furthermore, early modern typographical conventions mean that in pre-1700 texts in particular certain characters are often used interchangeably: the character u often appears as a v, and vice versa, such that the word love often appears as loue, and usurper sometimes appears as vsurper. Similarly, the characters j and i are often exchanged, with the word juniper occasionally appearing as iuniper, and Icarus as Jcarus. In Literature Online all of these variant forms are preserved exactly from the source text and appear in the alphabetical word index on the Keyword(s) List page (click select from a list > alongside the Keyword(s) field). Variant forms can be added to your search to compensate for these typographical conventions. Alternatively, Literature Online allows you to include typographical variants in your results automatically using the checkbox on the Texts search screen. If you check this box and submit your search, Literature Online will find variant forms of your search term in which the character v has been substituted for u, u for v, j for i or y, i for j or y, y for i or j, w for vv or uu, and s for f. A number of searching strategies are available when researching historical texts affected by irregular spellings and early modern typographical conventions. Example 5a Find works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dealing with the theme of jealousy, including works in which this word jealousy appears as iealousy, jelouzie, jealovsie etc.:
Literature Online will search for all terms matching je?lo?s* or je?lo?z* that have any character or no character in the position occupied by the two single character wildcards (?), and with any ending in place of the truncation operator (*), for instance jealous, jealousy, jealovs, jelouzie, jealousiy, jealosie, jellosie and jelowsye. The inclusion of typographical variants will broaden your search so that it includes such terms as ieælousie, iealousie, ielosie and ielowsy. Your List of Results for this search should include numerous hits in a large number of works including John Davies' Microcosmos: The Discovery of the Little VVorld and Sir John Harington's Orlando Fvrioso (under the Poetry tab); James Shirley's The Court Secret, Richard Brome's The Antipodes: A Comedie, Philip Massinger's The Bond-Man and Shakespeare's The Merry Wiues of Windsor (under the Drama tab), as well as Richard Greene's Pandosto, John Lyly's Euphues and His England and Sir Henry Wotton's A Courtlie Controuersie of Cupids Cautels (under the Prose tab). Example 5b As an alternative to using wildcards, try selecting your search terms manually using the select from a list > link. This method is more precise, allowing you to exercise more control over the endings of the words you retrieve (if, for example, you are looking for nouns only or for particular forms of a verb). Tip: avoid entering more than fifteen terms in the Keyword(s) field in a single search. For particularly complex queries involving many variants selected from the Keyword(s) List, try performing a series of simpler searches. It is possible to combine two searches to form a single List of Results using Search History (using the 'OR' operator to include all results from both searches).
Tip: when you select terms using the select from a list > functionality, Literature Online automatically inserts the Boolean operator OR between terms so that your search will retrieve any work that contains one or more of your selections. You can type Boolean and proximity operators such as and, or, not or near yourself should you wish to do so (in either upper or lower case). When you have reviewed your results, construct further searches involving other variant forms of the noun jealousy:
All of these searches produce lengthy Lists of Results and could be made more specific in a number of ways. Try selecting a Literary Period of shorter duration, such as 'Tudor Period, 1500-1603', or use the 'Limit Keyword to' field in the Advanced search options for Drama to restrict your searches to castlists, in order to retrieve examples of plays which contain jealous characters or in which Jealousy itself appears as an allegorical personage. Alternatively, try pasting the same search terms into the Title Keyword(s) field. Non-standard CharactersFor the purposes of searching, Literature Online treats non-standard characters such as the thorn (þ) exactly like their modern equivalents, so that a search for the keyword auther will retrieve occurrences of auther, auþer and auðer. Entering auþer in the Keyword(s) field will retrieve precisely the same results. Similarly, a search for keyword aegis will retrieve occurrences of both aegis and ægis. Words containing non-standard characters can be selected from the alphabetically-arranged Keyword(s) List (click select from a list >); such words can also be copied from other sources, such as Word documents or the electronic versions of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts in Literature Online, and pasted into the Keyword(s) field. Example 6 Find the phrase "Siþen þe sege":
This search will retrieve the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Search: Criticism and ReferenceExample 7 Find criticism and reference resources relating to Derek Walcott's Omeros:
This search will retrieve a range of articles and citations (under the Criticism tab) as well as a biography and a reference work entry (under the Reference tab) and links to third-party web resources (under the Web Sites tab). Tip: for basic searches such as this, using one or two relevant keywords (Omeros or Walcott Omeros) in the Quick Search box on every screen will often produce the results you need. Example 8 Find reviews of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999):
Tip: you don't need to use quotation marks when searching for phrases using the Criticism & Reference searches, except when your phrase contains the words and, or, not or near. Literature Online treats the words and, or, not or near as Boolean and proximity operators unless they form part of a phrase enclosed in quotation marks. To broaden your search to include reviews that mention Spivak's work, try typing Critique of Postcolonial Reason in the Keyword(s) field instead. Alternatively, leave the Keyword(s) and Title Keyword(s) fields blank and use the select from a list > link next to the Subject field to select the exact form Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, which will allow you to retrieve reviews of all Spivak's writings. Example 9 Find articles and reviews from the TLS relating to W. H. Auden:
This search will retrieve bibliographic records from the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) dating back to 1935.
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