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Scholars Research Guide

 

This is a small guide/tool only for those who are doing research in Indian Writing in English or I can say it is for Indian English Literature Research Scholars. I have given some of the useful tools and sources, and I hope it will help you in research.

 

How to select a Topic:

 

"Give me a good topic," asks one academic almoner. What is a "good" topic? There are rich accounts of villages and miserable histories of the world; brilliant explications of lines of poetry and dull lives of the poets. Of course, the history of the world may be rich, of the village miserable; and the explication dull, the life brilliant. It all depends. What Henry James remarked of the artist is as true of the scholar – the quality of the work is the quality of the mind of the writer.

Finding the sources, gathering the materials, is itself part of the scholar’s task. The ready-made bibliography is the tourist’s guide, very different from the trail Stanly made looking for Livingstone. Standard bibliographies there are, and welcome, like standard designs for embroidery. But ultimately the bibliography is as unique as the subject, the underside of the embroidery, where all the knots show. It’s up to the scholar to tie them.

From : Fundamentals of Research by Busnagi Rajannan, ASRC, Hyderabad, 1979.

 

Any research involves Four Fundamentals Steps:

  • Selecting a good topic.

  • Locating sources of information and finding the information itself.

  • Considering and organizing the collected information until you arrive at a reasonable conclusion or thesis and…

  • Presenting the findings.

Sources to Search:

 

Dissertations Abstracts International (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1861- .)Lists dissertations accepted for Ph.D. and other doctoral degrees by American and Canadian degree-granting institutions. Dates of coverage 1861 to the present. Coverage is identical for both print and CD-ROM, although the CD-ROM does not include abstracts for dissertations prior to 1981. Issued in three parts after 1969:

MLA Bibliography: (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1921-)
The MLA Bibliography indexes critical materials on literature, linguistics, and folklore. The database provides access to citations from over 4,000 journals and series published worldwide, as well as books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. The print volumes go back to 1921 and the database covers from 1963 to the present. The MLA Bibliography continues the Modern Language Association Annual Bibliography. For earlier volumes, check the SML Card Catalog under "Modern Language Association."

Guide to Indian Periodical Literature:

Indexes essays and articles materials on literature, linguistics almost multidiscipline all over Indian Serial Publications.

Contemporary Literary Criticism : CLC presents significant published criticism on the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, and other creative writers now living or who died after December 31, 1959. A complete bibliographical citation prefaces each critical essay and most essays are introduced by a brief annotation that establishes a context and purpose for the criticism. Entries also provide suggestions for further reading.

 

Dictionary of Literary Biography

The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) records the achievements of the world's most influential literary figures. Each entry includes personal data, the author's principal works, and sources for further study.

 

Online Database:

 

JSTOR : provides online, Fulltext access to over 300 core scholarly journals from date of inception to a "moving wall" of 2-5 years from present. The archived collection includes journals in humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The content is searchable by author, title, fulltext with limits by discipline, year, and article type.

List of Journals from JSTOR

African American Review

African Languages and Cultures. Supplement
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics
American Literary History
American Literature
American Speech
Boundary 2
Callaloo
Chinese Literature; Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR)
College Composition and Communication
College English
Comparative Literature
Contemporary Literature
Critical Inquiry
Cultural Critique
Diacritics
ELH
Feminist Studies
The French Review
The French Review. Special Issue
German Quarterly
Hispania
Hispanic Review
Italica
Japanese Language and Literature
Journal of African Cultural Studies
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Language
MELUS
MLN
Modern Language Journal
Modern Language Studies
Modern Philology
New England Quarterly
New German Critique
New Literary History
Nineteenth-Century Literature
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
Pacific Coast Philology
PMLA
Poetics Today
Renaissance Quarterly
Representations
The Review of English Studies
Rhetoric Review
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature
Shakespeare Quarterly
Signs
Social Text
South Atlantic Review
South Central Review (not yet released)
Speculum
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Studies in the Renaissance
Transition
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Twentieth Century Literature
Yale French Studies


Some of the Indian Journals:

 

Biblio: A Review of Books

Chandrabhaga: A Magazine of Indian Writing

CIEFL Bulletin

Indian Literature. New Delhi

Kakatiya Journal of English Studies

Kavya Bharati

LITTCRIT: An Indian Response to Literature

Osmania Journal of English Studies

Points of View

Re-Markings

The Aligarh Critical Miscellany

The Aligarh Journal of English Studies

The Indian Journal of English Studies

The Journal of Indian Writing in English

The Journal of the Poetry Society (India)

The Literary Criterion:

The Literary Half-yearly

The Little Magazine

 

Selected Web Resources:

 

Books of South Asian Writers Writing in English
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/mdamodaran/sabooks.html

 

Offers information on South Asian English literature, presented by Murali Damodaran for the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

 

Indian Writers in English
http://www.pugmarks.com/week/writers.htm

"The Week" magazine presents information about Indian writers who write in English. Biographical sketches and photographs of such authors as Amitav Ghosh (1956- ), Rohinton Mistry (1952- ), Upamany Chatterjee (1956- ), and others are available.

 

Indo-Anglian Fiction: Writing India, Elite Aesthetics, and the Rise of the Stephanian Novel
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-November-1997/gandhi.html

Presents "Indo-Anglian Fiction: Writing India, Elite Aesthetics, and the Rise of the 'Stephanian' Novel," an article written by Leela Gandhi and published originally in the November 1997 issue of the "Australian Humanities Review." Discusses the success of the Indian novel in English.

 

Sawnet Bookshelf: Books by and for South Asian Women
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/sawweb/sawnet/SAW.books.html

Published by South Asian Women's Network (SAWNET). Presents a list of books by and for south Asian women, provided by the South Asian Women's Network (SAWNET). Includes fiction and poetry, book reviews, descriptions of the books, and photographs of some of the authors. Notes that some of the entries include a chapter from the book. Links to sites of related interest.

 

The Presentation of Bibliography:

 

You should give serious thought to the arrangement of the final listing of works at the end of your dissertation or paper. This listing should be as useful as possible to the reader. You should make it clear what kind of list you have compiled. If you have gone through a great mass of material, the complete listing of which would serve no useful purpose, you may call the list "Works Cited," thereby limiting it to sources actually mentioned in the text or referred to in the footnotes. A title such as ‘‘A Selected Bibliography’’ would suggest a broader scope than "Works Cited" and yet would indicate the application of some principle of selection. If you wish to suggest an exhaustive survey of your field you may wish to call the list "Sources Consulted" and have a brief prefatory note indicating the reasons for a compendious listing. In studies dealing with a single author, it is often desirable to give a descriptive bibliography of the author’s works. Such listing should be clearly distinguished from the enumerative bibliography of other works which also may appear.

 

Whatever the bibliographical listing is called, its value is greatly enhanced by brief critical comments on significant titles, giving the reader a useful guide to the literature of the subject. It may not be necessary to annotate every item listed, but the more of this comment, the better. You should consult your guide about the advisability of including this kind of annotation.

 

For Bibliography presentation see :

MLA Handbook for writers of research papers by Joseph Gibaldi, Affiliated East-West Press Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 2003.

 

Resource Centers for ....

 

Indo-American Centre for International Studies (IACIS)

Osmania University Campus, Hyderabad 500 007, Ph: 040-27098608/09

email: [email protected]

 

Study Centre for Indian Literature in English Translation (SCILET)
American College, Madurai - 625 002. Phone (91- 452) 2533 609 Fax (91 – 452) 2531 056
[email protected] SCILET

 

Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad – 500 007.

 

The Poetry Society (India) L-67A, Malviya Nagar, New Delhi - 110 017.


The Institute of Commonwealth and American Studies and English Language (ICASEL)

Anjali 96, VII main, Jayalakshmipuram, Mysore – 570012.

 

National Institute for Research in Indian English Literature (NIRIEL)
NIRI
EL, 4-29, Jayanagar, Gulbarga - 585 105. Phone (91 8472) 2445 482.


Please if you find any useful information for research work, don’t forget to mail me..J

 

 

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