Library Guides: English 4996: Guide to Resources: Childhood in Literature: Research Databases and Print Books

Research & Criticism

Discover@MU
A simple and fast search engine that helps you find relevant information on any topic from the University of Missouri Libraries’ collections. Results contain citations for scholarly journal articles, books and e-books, DVDs, magazines, newspapers, and dissertations.
MLA International Bibliography Full Text
Indexes critical scholarship in the modern languages, literature, linguistics and folklore.
Free account can be created for personalization.
Date Coverage: 1963-date
Maximum Users: Unlimited
Truncation: Truncation: * Wildcard: ?
Academic Search Premier
This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than an abundance of journals and covers extensive academic disciplines and provides comprehensive content, including PDF back-files, videos, and searchable cited references.
Contains 4,600 journals, including full text for nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

Date Coverage:Varies; primarily 1970s-present with some titles covering earlier dates

Maximum Users: Unlimited

Truncation:
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JSTOR
Provides access to scholarly journals in the arts and sciences.
Specifically contains access to Arts and Sciences I, II, III, IV, Complement, Ecology & Botany and General Science Collections.
Free account can be created for personalization.
Date Coverage: Varies by title
Maximum Users: Unlimited
Truncation: Plurals: +

Search Guide: https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/115004701828-Search-Help-Resources-Overview
Literature Online
Provides access to English language literature in reference works, bibliographies, web pages and journals.
Free account can be created for personalization.
Formerly known as LION
Date Coverage: Varies by section
Maximum Users: 4
Truncation: Truncation: * Wildcard: ?
Google Scholar
Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Please see Google Scholar & Findit@MU for instructions on adding Findit@MU links to your Google Scholar page.
Date Coverage: NA
Maximum Users: Unlimited
Truncation: Not supported

Tips for Database Searching

Because this course is about childhood in literature it shares keywords with children's literature, so many search results will yield results that might not be what you are looking for. One way to get around this is to search by subject. Most databases have specific phrases they use to categorize materials. For example, the MLA International Bibliography Full Text database has a subject named "treatment of childhood" which will have titles more relevant for this course.

Using EBSCOhost's MLA International Bibliography Full Text, the following examples show how using database search techniques can optimize your research. Often in databases the search bar has multiple fields and allows you to select the Boolean operators to go between each keyword. If they do not, they can still be used to narrow or broaden results. Boolean operators do not need to be capitalized.

Boolean Operators

AND: Using AND narrows your search results. Using AND makes the database only pull articles with both phrases.

Example: Just searching the keyword Children returns 70,990 results. Children AND friendship returns 200 results. Children AND friendship AND emotion returns 6 results.

OR: Using OR broadens your search results. It is useful if you want to include synonyms for your keywords.

Example: Children AND supernatural returns 149 results. Children AND supernatural OR occult returns 3,221 results. Children AND supernatural OR occult OR mystic returns 4,815 results.

The second search will pull any results that are related to children and supernatural, as well as children and occult. Each additional OR will add more results with the word used.

NOT: Using NOT narrows your search results. It is useful if you do not want a specific word or phrase in our search results. It can also be used to eliminate concepts that might be associated with your search.

Example: Children AND Africa returns 690 results. Children AND Africa NOT language returns 372 results. Children AND Africa NOT language NOT western returns 354 results.

Other Techniques

Truncation: Use an asterisk to search for words that share the same root word. Instead of searching and returning results only with the phrase "child", truncation tells the database to return all words that start with "child", so it would find child, childs, children, childhood, childbirth, etc.

Wildcards: The symbol for Wildcards can vary from database to database, but the most common symbol is a question mark. Use a wildcard to stand in for any English character. This can be used for when words have different common spellings or when words have a hyphen between them.

Example: Wom?n would return results with both women and woman. Colo?r would return results with color and colour.

Quotations: Placing your search term in quotations makes the database return results where the exact phrase is found, without other words between.

Example: Problem child will return 477 results. "Problem child" will return 12 results.

Finding Print Books

If you want to find a book for your research, you can search the MERLIN catalog by subject, keyword, author, genre or form, and more. You can also search the MOBIUS catalog, which includes all academic libraries in Missouri, not just the University of Missouri system. These books can be requested and delivered to MU libraries. The MERLIN and MOBIUS catalogs are like any other database, so see "Tips for Database Searching" to optimize your results. However, MERLIN and MOBIUS do not search the full text of these books, just the description.

Here are some print books you might find helpful for your research:

Children in Culture by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Editor)
Children in Culture is a fully interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collection of ten new and original essays on theoretical approaches to childhood. In this volume, issues of or related to childhood are addressed through considering the child not as a constant biological and psychological entity, but as a culturally produced identity which fluctuates through time and place.
Cultures of Childhood by Charles Lock (Editor)
Volume 8 of the series Angles on the English-Speaking World takes the form of a tribute to Julia Briggs (1943-2007), a renowned scholar of children's literature and women's writing. The essays revolve around the themes of literature for children and the literary representation of childhood. The festschrift offers extensive coverage of the topic and contains nine scholarly articles by teachers in English studies at the Universities of Lund and Copenhagen.
Elusive Childhood by Susan Honeyman
Elusive Childhood examines how discourse touched by the identity politics of youth might be revised for fairness. Susan Honeyman demonstrates this potential by reading representations of children from throughout the Modern episteme in works of such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, and James Baldwin. Identity politics have changed the way we classify literature by opening up the canon, but they have also changed the way we approach literature. Recognizing political inequity in literary representations of children, Honeyman proposes a method of reading child figuration in relief to impose as little adult prejudice as possible. This might be impossible for adults, yet it is necessary to attempt.
The Child Figure in English Literature by Robert Pattison
Graveyards or wonderlands have more often than firesides and nurseries been the element in which we encounter the child in English literature, and Robert Pattison begins his narrative by asking why literary children are seldom associated with parents and family, but instead repeatedly occur as solitary figures against a background of social and philosophic melancholy. In a skillful fusion of theology, social history, and literature, Pattison isolates and analyzes the repeated conjunction of the literary figure of the child with two fundamental ideas of Western culture--the fall of man and the concept of Original Sin.
The Child in British Literature by Adrienne E. Gavin (Editor)
The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.
Witnessing Girlhood by Leigh Gilmore; Elizabeth Marshall
Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep and diverse archive of self-representational forms--slave narratives, testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books--Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures that link a range of texts and forms from the mid-nineteenth century to the contemporary period.
Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film by Adrian Schober
This book undertakes a study of the trope of possessed child in literature and film. It argues that the possessed child is fundamentally an American phenomenon which, first, may be traced to the Calvinist bias of the US as a nation founded on Puritanism and, second, to the rise of Catholicism in that country, to which Puritanism owes its origins.