Reviews of books using current and historic sources, online and in print.
Gale provides a range of excellent literary databases that include reviews from various periods for a vast range of authors. These reviews originally appeared in printed volumes of reviews published mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They include numerous reviews not available in the later online databases, so if you are looking for older reviews, it would be worth looking at the print volumes:
Nineteenth-century Literature Criticism, Twentieth-century Literary Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism
The online databases provide reviews which were published from around the 1990s up to the present. These databases include:
Gale literary databases
Literature Criticism Online and Something about the Author Online
Includes online versions of Dictionary of literary biography complete, Literature criticism, and Something about the author.
Extensive compilation of literary commentary available, including Children's literature review; Classical & medieval literature criticism; Contemporary literary criticism; Drama criticism; Literature criticism from 1400 to 1800; Nineteenth-century literature criticism; Poetry criticism; Shakespearean criticism and Twentieth-century literary criticism
Find up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world, including Contemporary Authors and the Scribner Writers Series and Twayne's World, U.S., and English Authors Series.
This is a general full-text database that includes journals containing book reviews. Many specialist journals on this database will include reviews of non-fiction works. It has excellent historic coverage, including items published from 1600.
Reviews found on online databases deal mainly with books published since about 1990.
Online databases do not always provide full book reviews: they may give the citations or abstracts of a journal reviews, which means you need to search the catalogue for the print journal. Most online databases are increasing their full-text content, so you may find all you need online. Librarians can help with searching the right resources.
Here are some online databases with book reviews:
MLA International Bibliography
These are printed indexes that provide citations to reviews. You then find the journal or source using this information. They provide references to sources not usually provided in later resources.
Readers Guide to Periodical Literature
For information on children's and young adult books, see our separate Children's literature guide.
The Library holds a substantial collection of newspapers.
These include Australian daily and local papers and overseas papers.
If newspapers are not indexed you could narrow down the likely date a review might have been published and browse through the literary pages of specific newspapers.
