What is background information?
Background information, or reference information, is the type of information you could get from Wikipedia. These resources will give you trustworthy overviews of a topic and provide you with basic things like dates, events and facts about your topic. Generally, you can think of this information in terms of the who, what, where and when of a topic.
Literature Specific Background Information
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Twentieth Century American Poetry This link opens in a new windowCollection includes 52,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets. Chadwyck-Healey
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Twentieth Century English Poetry This link opens in a new windowA collection of 594 volumes of poetry by 282 poets from 1900 to the present day. Chadwyck-Healey
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Play Index This link opens in a new window
Index to over 31,000 classic and historical plays dating from 1949, including one-act plays, pageants, plays in verse, radio and television plays, classic drama and monologues from famous playwrights. EBSCO/H.W. Wilson
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Short Story Index This link opens in a new window
Provides detailed indexing for more than 117,000 stories from more than 4,200 collections and anthologies. Use this to find a copy of a short story. EBSCO/H.W. Wilson
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Gale Literary Index This link opens in a new windowMaster index to the major literature products published by Gale. It combines and cross-references over 165,000 author names, including pseudonyms and variant names, and listings for over 215,000 titles into one source. A search of this database by the name of an author will result in citations to entries on that author and treatments of that author's major works in the 130 products published by the Gale group. This database will only provide the citation. The full text must then be located. Gale
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Humanities Full Text This link opens in a new window
Includes feature articles, interviews, obituaries and original works of fiction, drama and poetry in all fields of the humanities from art, classical studies, and film to journalism and more. EBSCO/H.W. Wilson
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Book Review Digest Plus This link opens in a new window
Brings together book reviews on subjects such as art, biography, business, education, general interest, history, humanities, literature, music, and more with coverage back to 1983. EBSCO/H.W. Wilson
Where to Find Background Information
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Gale eBooks This link opens in a new window
A database of full-text encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. Gale
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MasterFILE Complete This link opens in a new window
Designed specifically for public libraries, this multidisciplinary database provides full text for more than 2,000 general reference publications with full text information dating as far back as 1922. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, it also contains full text for more than 1,000 reference books and over 164,400 primary source documents, as well as an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps & flags. EBSCO