Research Guides: Medieval Drama: the York and Towneley Cycles: History of Criticism

Literary Criticism

It is often useful to get a sense of the shifting reception of a literary work from its initial reviews through the centuries. Many resources exist to help you do this.

Queen's Library holds 120 volumes of the "Critical Heritage" series: for a complete listing, do a "Title" search in Omni for this series title. Individual volumes review criticism of authors as diverse as Byron, Gaskell, and Nabokov.

Gale Literary Criticism Series
Provides immediate critical essays on a wide range of authors, usually giving a general overview of a writer's work or themes. Choose the appropriate set depending on the year of the author's death. Each volume contains cumulative author, nationality and title indexes at the back, referring to the specific volume number and set in which to find the entry.
If author's death date is:	You should turn to:
After Dec.31 1959 (or author is still living)	Contemporary Literary Criticism REF PN771.C59
1900 - 1959	Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism REF PN771.G27
1800-1899	Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism REF PN761.N5
1400-1799	Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 REF PN86.L53 1984 (excluding Shakespeare)
Antiquity-1399	Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism REF PN861.5.C57