American Literature: Keeping Current in the Field

You can set up search alerts in most of our databases to receive an email when new publications appear based on your search terms. Our guide offers instructions for setting up alerts in Multi-Search and Google Scholar.

Browzine is an app that lets you add relevant scholarly journals to a bookshelf and alerts you when new articles or issues are published. See our BrowZine guide for more information. Sample titles include:

Annual Surveys of Scholarship

These three sources summarize and evaluate what they consider the major publications from a given year. Coverage generally lags behind several years, meaning the 2018 volume will cover 2015/2016 publications.

American Literary Scholarship: Annual set of essays reviewing the published scholarship during that year; covers works on American authors, genres, periods, and themes.

Year's Work in English Studies: Annual set of essays surveying the state of scholarship on literatures in English and English language studies. 

Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory: Annual set of essays reviewing the year's scholarly publishing in major critical schools and theories.

Publishing Directories

Use the following directories to identify periodicals (scholarly journals and mainstream magazines) by their subject or genre focus.

MLA Directory of Periodicals (part of the MLA International Bibliography--click on "Browse Periodicals" at the top of the search screen to get to the directory): Major directory of periodicals in literature, rhetoric, language studies, film, and drama which includes contact information, subject scope, submission requirements, circulation numbers, and often acceptance rates. 

Ulrichsweb: A directory of over 160,000 magazines and journals; use the Advanced Search to limit to scholarly/academic journals. The subject categories are very broad, i.e., "Education" so try a title search if the subject search isn't retrieving what you need. Major titles usually have a yellow star next to them and often link to reviews from Magazines for Libraries or Library Journal.