Good News for Gothicists
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) was recently added to the Olin Reference collection (at PN3435 E56 2013). This two-volume set “brings together over 200 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars writing on all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with challenging insights into the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture.” Among the topics covered are Queer Gothic, Commodity Gothicism, Campus Gothic, Postcolonial Gothic, Vampire Fiction, Gothic Theory, and Zombies.
Oxford Bibliographies Now Available
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Several Oxford online bibliographies in literature and related areas are now available:
American Literature
British and Irish Literature
Cinema and Media Studies
Medieval Studies
Renaissance and Reformation
Victorian Literature
Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offer authoritative, core bibliographies on important topics. Each subject area is overseen by an Editor in Chief, an Editorial Board, and peer reviewers, some of whom are current Cornell faculty. Searching the Classic Catalog for the title oxford bibliographies will retrieve linked records for the individual subjects.
Latino Literature Online
The Library now has access to Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction. This online resource contains approximately 48 plays and 13,000 pages of prose and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino/a writers working in the United States. When complete this database will include 100,000 pages of fiction and poetry and 450 plays. The vast majority of the materials are from the Chicano Renaissance to the present. About 30% of the database is previously unpublished or rare material. Connect to it through the record in the Classic Catalog. A link through Database Names is on the way.
Princeton Poetics Makeover
The new edition of the venerable Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, the first update in 20 years, can be found in Olin Reference (REF PN 1021 N39 2012+ c.2) as well as in the Graduate Study Room collection in Olin 305. Maintaining its global scope, the 4th edition of the Encyclopedia revises and expands existing entries and adds ca. 250 new entries prompted by changes in the field of literary studies during the last two decades. At more than 1600 pages, it dwarfs its predecessors. (Note: the online version available through the LION database is still the 1993 edition.)
BBC Shakespeare in Streaming Video
The Library has acquired a one-year subscription to Ambrose Video’s BBC Shakespeare Plays in streaming video. The 37 television adaptations were produced from 1978 through 1985, enlisting directors such as Alvin Rakoff, Jonathan Miller, David Hugh Jones, and Jane Howard, as well as actors John Gielgud, Alan Rickman, Claire Bloom, and Helen Mirren, among others. This is a trial, so please let me know (at fmm1@cornell.edu) whether or not you find this resource useful for your teaching and research. If the response is positive, we’ll renew our subscription.
Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature
Just added to the Olin Reference collection: The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; Olin Ref PR411 E53 2012), a three-volume set covering “the English literary landscape from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Featuring over 400 clear and accessible entries on a wide range of writers and literary forms…as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, writings in manuscript, ballads, cookbooks, and other popular literary forms.”
Literary Magazine Finding Aid Updated
American Literary Magazines In Olin Library, the online finding aid for current poetry and fiction journals available in the Olin stacks and Current Periodicals Room, has been updated and recast in a new format. In addition to print locations, the guide includes links to the journal websites and notes titles whose backfiles are available online in JSTOR. The guide also lists directories, biographical sources, and indexes to poetry and fiction published in journals.
Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), a three-volume reference work covering British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, has recently been added to the Reference collection in Olin (Ref PR447 E55 2012). Under the general editorship of Frederick Burwick (UCLA), the Encyclopedia includes more than 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes. Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes.
Olin Exhibit: Cornell Poets on Cornell
This exhibit features the work of six poets who have taught or studied at Cornell and whose work has garnered substantial recognition among critics and peers. Each poem takes the physical location of the Cornell campus or its natural surroundings as a vantage point from which to examine both the outer and the inner life, mapping the metaphysical borderland that merges personal experience with human consciousness on a universal scale. To quote A.R. Ammons, the poems are examples of “poetry as a local action implying the broadest canopy.”
The selection samples a half-century of writing, from the 1950s to the present, a period of great change at Cornell as it was everywhere. But though ways of perceiving and questioning the self and society took radical new directions, the natural beauty and geographical isolation of Tompkins County continued to offer small but inspiring discoveries: “hidden falls,” “windrows of pine,” “a landscape of layers,” any of which might trigger transformative thought and language as the poets sought to locate themselves in the world, and in the process create, as Ammons’s wrote, “an apprehended place” that, once visited, might be inscribed as deeply in the reader’s memory as any actual gorge or lake. ~ Fred Muratori, exhibit curator
Poets & their works:
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| A.R. Ammons, “Triphammer Bridge” | John Brehm, “Inside and Out” | Jody Gladding, “Taughannock Falls” |
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| Kenneth A. McClane, “Ithaca” | W.D. Snodgrass, “The Campus on the Hill” | Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, “Ithaca” |
Caribbean Literature Now Online
To support the growing scholarly interest in writing from the Caribbean region, the Library has acquired online access to Caribbean Literature, a searchable, full-text database of fiction, poetry, manuscripts, archival content, interviews, photographs, and other material extending from the 19th century to the present day, embracing the writing of early figures such as Ardouin Coriolan and Agustín Acosta through that of contemporaries Derek Walcott and Edwidge Danticat. Much of this work is difficult to find in any form and was obtained from archives, licensed from local publishing houses, and in some cases provided by the authors themselves. The collection is multi-lingual, including works in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages. Complementing the writings themselves are author interviews, language dictionaries (such as Rastafari Lexicon and Dictionnaire des Néologismes Créoles), as well as other reference resources. As the focus of literary studies expands and deepens, Caribbean Literature will offer new possibilities for research, teaching, and learning at Cornell.