Subject databases: Where less is more
Oberlin provides access to hundreds of subject databases, which you can access through our Databases A-Z.
Searching with Summon, our cross-platform tool, will typically produce a high number of total results, many of which may not be highly relevant to your research.
Searching in a subject database specific to your topic will typically produce fewer results, but of those results, a much greater percentage will be highly relevant to your research.
Note: To find databases relevant to your research, you can filter the Databases A-Z by Subject (e.g., French; Literature), by the Type of content available in the database (e.g., Scholarly & Peer Review), or by the Vendor (e.g., ProQuest; EBSCO).
Proxied access
Access to many subject databases is available to you courtesy of an Oberlin College Libraries subscription. Rather than provide credentials at the individual user level, many of these subscription databases authenticate your access by checking for an Oberlin College Internet Protocol (IP) address. To access useful databases from anywhere via our proxy server, follow the links provided in our Databases A-Z.
Databases: Primary or exhibit sources
These databases are particularly useful for finding French literature from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century.
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eBook Central (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to full-text electronic editions of 150,000 ebooks from 750+ publishers, 1,500 imprints. Search by specifying subjects, keywords, authors, publishers, publication years, or other information available for the documents. Many titles are leased.
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Gale Literature This link opens in a new windowFull-text database that includes author biographies and work overviews, literary criticism, and indexed books, essays, and articles on world literature, and well as full-text of poems, short stories, novels, essays, speeches and plays.
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Gale Primary Sources (OhioLINK Access) This link opens in a new window
Topically focused collections of historical documents, including the American Civil Liberties Union Papers (1912-1990), Archives Unbound, Archives of Sexuality & Gender, British Library Newspapers, The Economist Historical Archive (1843-2014), 18th Century Collections Online, Indigenous Peoples: North America, 19th Century Collections Online, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, Political Radicalism & Extremism in the 20th Century, Sabin Americana (1500-1926), and The London Times Digital Archive (1785-1985).
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Gallica Digital LibraryOver a million documents accessible for free: Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Images, Newspapers, Magazines, Periodicals, Sound records, Music, Scores, e-Books.
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HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a repository of digital content from 50 research libraries, including electronic versions of nearly 8 million books at the time of writing.
Note: As of May 2023, Oberlin is a HathiTrust member. Oberlin students, faculty, and staff can access member features by clicking on the “LOG IN” button, choosing “Oberlin College and Conservatory”, and using their ObieID to authenticate.
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Internet ArchiveFree access to digital collections including music, video, web sites and millions of public-domain books. Home of the Wayback Machine, where you can see what the web looked like in the past.
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Project GutenbergA volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that an be used on almost any computer.
Databases: Background
These databases are particularly useful for situating your research into French literature within wider contexts— be these sociocultural, historical, geographical…
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Gale Literature This link opens in a new windowGale Literature is a full-text database that includes topic overviews, author biographies, work overviews, literary criticism, and indexed books, essays, and articles on world literature, as well as full-text of poems, short stories, novels, essays, speeches and plays. See for example: Modern French Literature (in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism)
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Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new windowOxford Bibliographies are authoritative guides to reliable peer-reviewed resources and scholarship, curated and annotated by subject experts, offering overviews that provide non-experts with a point of entry into unfamiliar areas of study. Oberlin's subscription includes African and Latin American Studies bibliographies, which may provide context for Francophone literatures of Africa, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and related diasporas. See for example: 19th Century Haitian Novel (in Latin American Studies).
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Oxford Reference This link opens in a new windowOxford Reference provides access to hundreds of Oxford University Press reference works, including dictionary, general, language, and subject reference works. See for example: The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French
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Oxford Research Encyclopedias This link opens in a new windowOxford Research Encyclopedias include authoritative reference works in a wide array of academic fields, including the humanities, social science, and natural science. See for example: The Holocaust in French Jewish Literature of the 20th Century (in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature).
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Very Short Introductions This link opens in a new windowTitles in Oxford's Very Short Introductions series provide concise introductions to a diverse range of subjects, written by experts in the field who combine facts, analysis, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make challenging topics highly readable. See for example: French Literature: A Very Short Introduction.
Databases: Literary criticism
These databases are particularly useful for exploring the arguments and critical methods being advanced by scholars of French literature.
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Cairn.info This link opens in a new window
Cairn.info provides access to 600+ French language publications in the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, and public health, including books, journals, magazines, and encyclopediae. Access to abstracts and indexing is available for all resources; open, full-text access is available for many resources.
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FRANCIS (International Humanities and Social Sciences) This link opens in a new windowFRANCIS (1972-2015) was a bibliographic database produced by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and offered indexing to and abstracting of international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary resources in the humanities and social sciences. Subjects covered by FRANCIS included archaeology, art history, ethnology, French literature, geography, history of science and technology, information science, linguistics, management, philosophy, prehistory, religion, and sociology. Currently, CNRS maintains an archived version of FRANCIS. Dates of Coverage: 1984-2015
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MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowMLA International Biography provides an index to books, essays, and journal articles on modern languages, literatures, fiction, folklore, and linguistics. Topics include literary theory, criticism, folk literature and belief systems, linguistics, semantics, translation, dramatic arts, and history of printing and publishing. This platform covers literature worldwide, and includes materials in all genres and in languages other than English. Dates of Coverage: 1926-
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Portail Persée This link opens in a new window
Portail Persée is a French-language resource providing open, full-text access to French scholarly publications (journals, books, conference proceedings, serial publications, primary sources, etc.) in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
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Érudit This link opens in a new window
Érudit is a multi-university publishing consortium, providing access to 300+ Canadian and Francophone scholarly and cultural publications, including open, full-text access to 150+ scholarly publications.