Search Tips

Find your set text
Find resources on a set author
Find criticism on a specific text
Find definitions of literary terms
Find quotations
Search within texts
Find all the members of a literary movement

Find your set text

In Search: Texts, you can search for works by title by simply entering words or phrases into the Title Keyword field. You don't need to use capital letters. Literature Online contains thousands of frequently-studied texts that can be retrieved by simple title searches such as lady lazarus, bartleby, my last duchess, the waste land, goblin market, song of myself, aunt jennifer's tigers, the minister's black veil, or montage of a dream deferred.

Note: if you enter more than one word, this must be a complete phrase from within the work title (e.g. christ's nativity will find Milton's 'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity', but ode nativity will not).

If you are unsure of the exact title, try using the Boolean operator AND to combine terms: importance AND earnest will find Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest; bird AND claws will find Wallace Stevens's 'The Bird with the Coppery, Green Claws'.
If you can't find the text you need, this could be because you haven't matched the exact spelling of the version we have used. For example, twelfth night gets no hits by Shakespeare because the 1623 text we have used is entitled Twelfe Night. You can find this by using the truncation operator - twelf* - or by selecting keyword terms from a list:

Enter Twelfth in title keyword, then click 'Select from a list'; select multiple terms twelf, twelfe and twelvth by checking the relevant boxes; click Select; add Shakespeare in the Author field, and click Submit Search.

Alternatively, use the Complete Contents to browse through all the volumes in Literature Online: select Renaissance English Drama, 1500-1660; select Shakespeare, William; browse through the list of plays to find Twelfe Night.

Note: you are allowed to print off one copy of a work from Literature Online as long as this is for private study only (see our Copyright Conditions ). You are also able to copy and paste passages from these works into Word documents so that you can quote them in your essays. To read about how to cite works from Literature Online, click here.

Find resources on a set author

Type the author name in Quick Search, or in Search: Authors. Click on the author's name in your list of results to go to the Author Page, which has links to all the relevant resources on this author: this could include texts by the author, a biography, full-text journal articles, a bibliography or web links.
You can search by surname, full name and variant names, e.g.: twain or mark twain or twain, mark or clemens, samuel.
If you can't find the author, try the 'Select from a list' function on the author page to browse through an alphabetical list.

Find criticism on a specific text

The simplest method is to use Quick Search:

In many cases, entering the work title alone in Quick Search will produce excellent results. Searches for Great Gatsby or Heart of Darkness both return good selections of current journal articles, reference work entries, student guides and bibliographic records. All these resources will have the work title in either the title or subject field.
If the title is a commonly used word, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, combine the title with the author's name; i.e. Morrison Beloved.

Search: Criticism and Reference allows more flexible searching. For example:

In the Search: All screen, broaden your search by using the Keyword field: a search for White Noise in Keyword and DeLillo in Author/Subject retrieves a wide range of resources, all of which are subject-indexed under DeLillo's name, and mention his novel White Noise in the full text.
Use the Criticism search screen for more advanced searches: you can enter the work title in the Title Keyword field to find critical works that mention the work in their title, or in the Keyword field. Try combining this with the author's name in the Subject field. Examples:

Raisin in the Sun in Keyword; Hansberry, Lorraine in Subject.
Hamlet in Title Keyword; Shakespeare in Subject. Restrict your search by selecting 'Search in: Full text only', and 'Limit to: Articles'.
Combine with a theme; e.g. enter lighthouse in Title Keyword, Woolf in Subject and paint* in Keyword. This will find references to 'painters' and 'painting' in articles on Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Find definitions of literary terms

The Criticism and Reference area of Literature Online contains a library of reference works that include entries on terms from the fields of literary criticism and theory, poetics, cultural theory, post-colonial studies and related areas. You can find these by:

Entering a term in Quick Search, such as accentual verse, deconstruction, dialogism, cultural capital, negritude, new historicism, synecdoche, negative capability, verisimilitude, subaltern, interpolation or sublime. Results will appear in the Reference category.
Going to the Reference page in Search: Criticism and Reference. Here you can:

Restrict your search to a specific reference work.
Select subject terms from a list.

Find quotations

Use the Keyword search in Search: Texts to find quotations from literary works. Remember:

If the quotation appears in several literary works, you can restrict your search by author. For example, all the world's a stage appears in 27 texts in addition to Shakespeare's As You Like It.
If your phrase includes Boolean and proximity operators such as AND, NOT, OR, or NEAR, you may need to use quotation marks. For example:

Searching for pipes and timbrels will find every text that includes the word 'pipes' and the word 'timbrels'; "pipes and timbrels" will restrict your search to texts such as Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' that contain this exact phrase.
Searching for I could not stop for death will find any text that includes the phrase 'I could' but not the phrase 'stop for death'; " I could not stop for death" will find Emily Dickinson's poem containing this exact phrase.

If you can't remember the exact quotation, try using proximity operators such as near (finds two words within 5 words of each other) or fby (finds one word followed by another). For example, bliss fby dawn will retrieve the quotation 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!' from Wordsworth's The Prelude.
If you are searching in old texts, you might need to use the new wildcard operator. For example, in the 1609 edition of Shakespeare's sonnets the phrase 'summer's lease' in Sonnet 18 is spelt 'Sommers lease'; a search for s? mmers will retrieve both summers and sommers. The same sonnet contains the phrase 'rough windes'; to retrieve this, you could search for rough wind? s, as the ? wildcard stands in for 1 or 0 characters.

Search within texts

You can use the Search: Texts screen to search for words and phrases within literary texts, allowing you to:

Explore a theme within your set text. For example, you could search within the text of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for words connected to the theme of social class, such as rank, fortune, connections, property, society, or inferiority, and then compare different characters' attitudes to class distinctions and social etiquette.

Enter rank or fortune or connections or property in Keyword, pride and prejudice in Title Keyword and Austen in Author.
From your results, click on the title of Pride and Prejudice to download the whole text.
Then, click on First Hit, and keep clicking on the hit navigation links to find further occurrences of your keywords.
You can also use a truncation search to find variant forms of a word; if you are interested in the way in which female characters' suitability for marriage is discussed, you could search for accomplish* in Keyword - this will find instances of 'accomplished' and 'accomplishments' as well as 'accomplish'.

Analyse recurring imagery and allusion within a novel or play:

Search for the keyword red in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Find instances of the keywords fire and flame in H.D.'s Trilogy.
Find all references to Venus in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
Search for the keywords animal* or bird* in Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

Use new search features to find keywords in texts with old spelling.

Explore the theme of justice in Shakespeare's King Lear. You will need to check the variant typography box, because in early modern texts, justice is often spelt iustice. You can combine this with the truncation operator: a search for just* will return hits for iustice, iustices, iustification and iustly as well as iust.

Navigate your way around a long text; if you are studying Dickens's Bleak House, for example, you can use Literature Online to locate key passages immediately:

Find the first time the character Smallweed appears.
Find every reference to the Borrioboola-Gha project.
Find every occasion that Mr Jarndyce refers to the 'East wind', by searching for east near wind in Keyword, and bleak house in Title Keyword.

Find all the members of a literary movement

From Search: Authors, select a Literary Movement from the list, e.g. Black Mountain School or Gothic Novel ( 1764- c. 1820).
From the list page, you can open the Notes on Literary Movements to read the definition that our editors have used in assigning authors to this movement.
From the list of results, you can save the search to My Archive, or add the records to your Marked List so that you can email or print them.
You can link through to the Author Page for each author, from where you can read texts by the author, or follow links to biographies, criticism and other resources.