This volume continues the series of Literary Research: Strategies and Sources and contains common elements of the series: introduction to online searching, general literary reference, library catalogues, bibliographies, indexes and annual reviews, scholarly journals, reviews, period journals and newspapers, microform and digital collections, manuscripts and archives and Web resources. The author faces the dilemma of presenting information for a novice searcher (whether an advanced undergraduate or a professional scholar) who is working in a complex conceptual environment, in this case, American postmodern literature, defined here as 1950-1990. Postmodernism itself is a fraught term and a controversial concept, both within the field and without. A guide situating postmodernism in a literary context and reflecting the debates that raged as the literature was developed, and the discussions it continues to provoke would be welcome. Unlike its counterpart, Literary Research and British Postmodernism (Hartsell-Gundy and McCafferty, 2015), this guide does so most directly in the section covering dictionaries, encyclopedias and companions to the postmodern period.
Underpinning the book is the desire to teach how to “hone in on a research question” and “locate and assess quality sources” (p. ix). This needs to sift through a large number of hits results in a guide focused on setting up the parameters for searching and evaluating in an era of abundant information. Clearly over-supply is the case for most searchers in this era; however, it does leave the searcher who gets too few or no results at a loss.
Overall, the author does an outstanding job of describing in writing processes that consist of complicated sets of steps relying primarily on visual cues. There is a fair amount of library jargon used throughout that could frustrate a beginning library user, e.g. “proxy server” or “digital rights management”. Her descriptive skill and approachable style are not served by the poor quality of the illustrations throughout, which makes them less useful or even, at times, incomprehensible.
Chapter 1 is devoted to the Basics of Online Searching, divided into six steps: Create a Research Question; Brainstorm Keywords; Understanding MARC Records; Building a Search Strategy; Choosing a Database; and Searching the Internet. In the current search environment, step three, Understanding MARC Records appears to be out-of-place in the sequence of steps. The library catalogue is one of many databases that could be used, especially as more and more libraries offer integrated catalogue and database searching. More logical would be: choosing where to search; searching the library catalog (including MARC records); and searching the internet.
In Chapter 2, General Literary Reference Sources, the author lists and annotates a solid selection of companions and handbooks to general literature, postmodernism and American literature from the time period. Given the time at which the book was probably sent to press, it is not surprising that the Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Müller, 2017) and A Dictionary of Postmodernism (Niall, 2016) were not included.
Library Catalogs are discussed in Chapter 3. After describing how catalogues work in general, including authority files, the author explores union catalogs (including WorldCat in detail) and the Library of Congress. Last, she turns to “discovery services”. These services, controversial among subject-specialist librarians, are treated with scrupulous fairness, the author pointing out the pros and the cons of using a multi-database search vis-à-vis more targeted sources.
Subsequently, those more targeted sources are addressed: bibliographies, indexes and annual reviews. Under the heading of “general” literature bibliographies and indexes, the author includes JSTOR and ProjectMuse, reasoning that “these databases are often used as indexes in their broad coverage of a variety of subjects” (p. 54). Scholarly journals are covered in Chapter 5, something that will be appreciated in particular by graduate students or anyone looking for places in which to publish. Chapter 6 quite thoroughly covers searching for reviews. There is important guidance as to how to work with archives and how to locate archives and material in archives, in Chapter 8.
The seventh chapter, Magazines and Newspapers, gives indications of places to look for newspaper content written by or about postmodern literary figures. It is a little uneven as to coverage, mentioning LexisNexis but not Factiva, for example, and omitting the Alternative Press Index. Choosing Web Resources to include as Chapter 9 must be a difficult task, one that initially the author pulls off with dexterity when presenting Scholarly Portals, Author Sites, Catalogs and Electronic Text Archives. The difficulty arises when forced to choose among the many candidates for Cultural and Historical Web Resources and Organizations and Cultural Awareness Resources. Those two categories are less well defined and offer a less coherent approach.
The final chapter is devoted to Researching a Thorny Problem. In this chapter, the author describes in detail ways that she would approach a reception study of Octavia Butler, the renowned science-fiction writer who died in 2006. The Appendix contains important reference sources in disciplines related to Postmodern American literature, beginning with the general and ending with the social sciences.
This guide to Literary Research and American Postmodernism will be useful to those who take the time to read through the approachable text and to educate themselves on literary research, as well as for anyone who dips in and out of the book for a guide or a database that may be useful at a given moment.
