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Literary Research: Getting Started

This guide provides resources for undertaking research on literature.

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Librarian

Amy Mallory-Kani

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CC BY-NC

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

What is Literary Research?

Literary research includes:

research on literary terms in preparation for a close reading
finding and evaluating secondary, scholarly sources on literature and language
archival research for historical context
using tools and methods form digital humanities to explore larger corpora or to create digital artifacts (i.e. digital editions of texts)

Annotation and Notetaking

Before you begin your literary research, you need to read (and reread) your chosen texts and annotate them.

Annotation
This resource by the University of Illinois-Springfield discusses best practices for annotating texts.