Theatre Research Resources  Tags: theatre  

Contemporary literary criticism select

Drama Criticism. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991-.
Q. 809.2 D797 / English Library Reference

A multi-volume set which provides an introduction to major dramatists from all eras and nationalities. Each volume selects 8-10 authors and reprints selected criticism of their works. The most recent volume indexes all previous volumes.

MLA Bibliography, 1963-Present

Identifies citations to studies of drama and other literary topics in scholarly books and journals. For help in searching, please look at our MLA Brief Search Guide and for help finding cited articles in the UIUC library system, check our MLA Citation Guide.

Modern Drama: Scholarship and Criticism, 1981-1990, An International Bibliography. By Charles A.Carpenter. University of Toronto, 1997.
Z5781 C371997 / Music and Performing Arts Library Reference       

A selective list of significant publications covering the study of world drama since Ibsen.

One of the best ways to find works of criticism on theatre topics is running a subject search.  Subjects are assigned to items in strings that follow certain rules.  For this topic, your string should start with:

          Drama

          or

          Theater

If you search for "Drama" as a subject, it will return all related items. You can narrow these results by adding a time period:

          Drama -- 19th century

          Drama -- 20th century

You can narrow this further and specifically target works of criticism:

          Drama -- 19th century -- History and Criticism

If you're still getting too many results or have something very specific in mind, you can narrow even further:

          Drama -- 19th century -- History and Criticism -- Bibliography

          Drama -- 19th century -- History and Criticism -- Congresses

          Drama -- 19th century -- History and Criticism -- Periodicals

          Drama -- 19th century -- History and Criticism -- Indexes

If you search for "Theater" you can add the phrase "History and Criticism" without a region or time period:

           Theater -- History and Criticism

You can run a search under the "Subject" tab in the catalog and browse the results to find other strings that might be helpful to you specifically. 

If you find that you're having difficulty using the catalog or finding the kind of information you're looking for, please don't hesitate to ask for help!

Newspapers are a really good source for reviews and criticism. Check the ORR for individual paper titles, like the New York Times, or use the "News" tab of Lexis Nexis to search several papers at once.

You may also find that you need older papers than is available in the above tools. One of the best resources to use when looking for historical newspapers is ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  This will allow you to search newspapers from New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Washington D.C. 

Some tips:

• When you search, you can select the newspaper or newspapers that are the most relevant for your needs.  The database will let you search more than one at a time but you can't search current and historical newspapers concurrently.

• You can narrow your results by limiting the results to a particular time period.  This can be useful if you're looking for reviews specifically of a premiere or a later run.

• When you run a search in this database, it's best to formulate a search fairly carefully because you are searching a lot of information.  To make the search as effective as possible, search for as much as you know, like the title, playwright, or performers, in quotation marks with AND in between them.   

                              Example:  "The Children's Hour" AND "Lillian Hellman" or "Harold Pinter" AND "The Homecoming" 

The quotation marks let the database know that you need those words to appear together and in that order and the AND limits the results to articles containing both phrases.

• You can also try running searches for reviews by particular critics. Just put the critic's name in quotation marks.  If you want, you can then add it to a search like the one above with a specific play in mind.