Selection Policy for Citations

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Literaryhistory.com focuses on signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages. It seeks to collect critical or explanatory web writings about American and British literature that will be of value for graduate students, scholars, teachers, college students, advanced high school students, and other intrepid readers of literature. We specialize in critical articles and we index only free articles.

Since our focus is on explanatory articles, we do not extensively index photos, web sites, hypertext projects, or creative materials. We do not usually link to etext versions of works of the authors, since we lack the expertise to evaluate these.

The selection policy has evolved since 1998, as better material has gradually come to appear on the internet. In the early days we sometimes posted student-authored papers, when there was little other public information on a major author. There's enough good criticism now that we can be more selective. The ideal procedure is to actively search by starting with a good print bibliography to identify the leading scholarly authorities on the author, then use a search engine to search for the scholar's name. This can often force to the top of a search list an otherwise out-of-the-way essay. Sometimes all that can be found will be reviews of a work by the scholar, or a publisher's web site for a book by him or her, but we will link to those just to make sure the scholar's name is represented on the author page. Even so, there are often scholar's names we'd like to include for whom there is not a single piece of writing to link to.

Specific categories of material included at literaryhistory.com: signed articles that are published on the internet in peer-reviewed journals; previously published articles posted on the internet by their authors or with the permission of their authors; academic conference papers; signed critical articles from reputable literary magazines; professor-created bibliographies; reviews of scholarly books and author biographies; writings on literary figures by recognized novelists and poets; Ph.D. dissertations (selectively); unsigned writings published under the aegis of a reputable educational or institutional publisher; articles originally published in respected print publications or by broadcasters like the Public Broadcasting Service; museum and library-created web sites with additional author material; some very old critical writings; the occasional thought-provoking English-class syllabus, audio file of the poet reading, or otherwise unclassifiable work.

We appreciate your comments, corrections and suggestions. Please send them to Donna Jan Pridmore, email djp at bu.edu