Poetry, Drama, Literary Criticism, Essays & Books on Writing

The General Collections & Humanities Center on the 3rd floor of the Main Library houses multiple literary collections, including collections of poetry, drama, literary criticism, Shakespeare criticism, essays, and humor, as well as print and online versions of the various Gale series of literature criticism. View the full New Literature Recommendations list.

Poetry

The poetry collection is both extensive and international in scope. The collection contains thousands of volumes of English and American poetry, as well as poetry translated from many languages into English. Contemporary American poetry is especially well represented in the collection.

Drama

The large international drama collection houses centuries of English and American plays, as well as plays translated into English, anthologies of scenes and monologues, and significant works of drama criticism.

Shakespeare

The vast research-level William Shakespeare collection contains all of the Bard’s plays and poetry in multiple editions, including folio facsimiles of the dramas, critical editions, performance editions, and anthologies of scenes and monologues with audio CD.

Shakespeare lovers will find here thousands of volumes of Shakespeare criticism, including biographies, sourcebooks, dictionaries, concordances, reception histories, monographs, and guides for the lay person, as well as materials written specially for students, writers, actors, and directors.

Additionally, the collection’s Gale Shakespeare Criticism series, in print and online, surveys centuries of Shakespeare criticism as well as the entire performance and reception histories of Shakespeare’s works until the present day.

Literary Criticism

This extensive undergraduate-level collection surveys many styles and schools of literary criticism and is international in scope.

The collection’s thousands of  volumes include critical monographs, anthologies of critical essays, literary biographies, works of genre criticism, histories of diverse national literatures, study guides, and complete editions of significant authors.

The collection also boasts a large selection of books on writing, with books on how to write novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, essays, and journalism, as well as practical resources for writers, such as grammars, style guides, citation guides, and books on editing and publishing.

The collection’s in-depth reference resources include handbooks, surveys, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, as well as full runs of various Gale literature, poetry, and drama criticism series in print and online.

Essays and Humor

This large, diverse collection includes books of essays by single authors, essay anthologies, anthologies of famous speeches, collections of famous letters, books of quotations, and books of lists, as well as anthologies of humorous essays, joke books, and comic monologues.

Databases

Literature criticism, commentary, and reviews can be accessed online through the Literature Resource Center (Gale) and Literature Criticism Online (Gale) databases. Articles on literary topics can also be found by searching these general databases: Academic OneFile (Gale), Academic Search Complete (Ebsco), and JSTOR.

The World Literature Book Club meets on the first Thursday of each month at 6:00 p.m.