The best means of finding scholarship on James Joyce's fiction is the MLA Bibliography. This is because this database is discipline-specific, unlike our library catalog. This means that the MLA Biblio improves the relevance of your search results by retrieving only scholarship of modern languages (e.g. scholars of English literature--i.e. scholars of Joyce). The library catalog, on the other hand, retrieves both scholarly sources from ANY discipline AND non-scholarly sources--so many of those results will be irrelevant (you probably don't need to know what a journalist or anthropologist thinks of Joyce's fiction).
To use the MLA Bibliography, first, log in using your Union credentials. Then try basic searches:
- Search for James Joyce and the text you are interested in (ex. Ulysses, Dubliners, etc.) as the subjects of the scholarly sources, as in the example below.
- Subject searches focus / narrow your results; searching for your keyword anywhere in the record broadens your results.
- Once you have identified a literary theme you are interested in, include that in your search for even more relevant results, as in the example below.
- Use "or" to broaden your search: ex. by linking synonyms so that your search terms match the terms in the database.
- Use "and" to narrow your search: ex. by finding sources that are on Catholicism in JJ's Ulysses
- If you retrieve too few results, broaden your search by searching keywords anywhere in the record (rather than in the subject), removing keywords, using different (broader) keywords, and / or replacing "and" with "or"
- If you retrieve too many results, narrow your search by searching subjects (rather than anywhere in the record), adding keywords, using different (more specific) keywords, and/ or replacing "or" with "and"
Once you have your search results, narrow them down to the most relevant and reputable sources on your topic by using the Filters on the left of the search results page.
The most reputable scholarship tends to be:
- recent, so use the Publication Date filter to find recent sources (ex. 2000 - 2022)
- in the form of peer-reviewed books or articles (not dissertations or conference papers, which are not peer-reviewed), so use the Source Types filter to select Academic Journals and Books
- published by reputable journals (if an article) and reputable presses (if a book).
- To evaluate whether a journal is reputable, see the list of key journals (below) and / or ask your professor, and use the Publication filter to narrow results to articles in reputable journals.
- Also, click the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" box on the left. Note that this does not mean that the remaining articles are peer reviewed, just that they are published in journals that conduct peer review.
- To evaluate whether a press is reputable, look for recognizable university presses (ex. Harvard University Press).
- of a certain length:
- Quality scholarly articles range from 15-35 pp. Shorter articles (1-5 pp.) may be book reviews and / or too short to be substantive.
- Quality scholarly books range from 150+ pp.
