Literary Reference Center Plus

Available via EBSCOhost, Explora or its own dedicated interface, Literary Reference Center Plus provides relevant information on thousands of authors and their works. In addition to contemporary and classic full-text poems, short stories, novels, and critical essays, the database includes: 

• More than 27,000 plot summaries, synopses and work overviews
• More than 217,000 author biographies
• More than 14,000 author interviews
• More than 680 full-text literary journals
• More than 2,900 full-text e-books
• More than 1.2 million book reviews
• More than 840 critical essays about popular young adult (YA) and children's literature titles, including film analyses
• More than 190 Critical Insights volumes

Additional Highlights

Literary Reference Center Plus includes full-text resources focusing on plays/drama, poetry, religious literature and children's literature. The database also includes volumes of fantasy/science fiction, contemporary literature, world philosophy and religious literature, and literary study guides covering American Literature, English Literature and literary genres.

Literary Reference Center Plus includes new contemporary literature titles from Salem Press, including:

• Critical Survey of Shakespeare’s Sonnets that provides historical context and analysis for 25 of the Bard's sonnets
• Introduction to Literary Context series that introduces students to great works of literature such as The Cask of Amontillado, Frankenstein, The Bell Jar and Heart of Darkness, providing historical context and illuminating key concepts and vocabulary

It also includes:

• Informational texts on numerous literary genres, themes and forms
• Full-text literary journals and magazines including Commonweal, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Kenyon Review, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and South Atlantic Review — featuring thousands of essays, fiction and poetry
• Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature, Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story
• Literary glossary featuring more than 1,700 terms
• Research guides

Functionality and Features

Literary Reference Center Plus features nearly three dozen interactive literary study guides for American and British novels and plays including:

• Animal Farm
• Romeo and Juliet
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Macbeth
• Hamlet
• Lord of the Flies
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Great Gatsby

In addition, it offers students and educators the following functionality:

• Google Drive and Google Classroom integration, allowing educators using Google Apps for Education to quickly share content with students
• Easy-to-browse categories of most studied authors and works, plus the ability to sort search results by content type, publication date, subject or publication
• Text-to-speech for HTML articles to provide teachers with an alternative content delivery method and to support struggling readers or those who prefer listening to information
• Citation tool to help students format bibliographic references, as well as the ability to save, print and e-mail citations directly from the interface
• Dedicated, mobile-friendly interface available 24/7 via desktop, smartphone or tablet — both at school and at home
• Autocomplete and spell checker to ensure the correct search terms are applied
• Personal folders for saving and sharing content

School Curriculum Support

Literary Reference Center Plus also features dozens of lesson plans and a link to EBSCO's Curriculum Standards Module, a tool that can help teachers in the U.S. and Canada to correlate EBSCO content quickly and easily to Common Core, state- or province-specific curriculum standards. The module provides browsing of specific benchmarks, many which have recommended search strings for successful content retrieval.