1. Literature Online (LION)
https://libguides.library.albany.edu/LION
Literature Online includes hundreds of thousands of both American and English works ranging from the 8th century to the 21st century. It covers many types of works, including essays, biographies, audio and visual collections, drama, articles, poetry, and prose. It also offers author profiles that include biographical information, primary sources, and criticism of their writing. This is a great, comprehensive source for anyone studying American literature. Although it also includes English literature, its search features allow you to limit your search of the literature collection to specific types of American works.
2. Gale Literature Resource Center
https://go-gale-com.libproxy.albany.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=albanyu
This database includes criticism, bibliographies, and biographies of authors from ancient times to the present day. It covers a wide range of authors, including poets, essayists, journalists, novelists, and more. It allows you to search by people or works, and search features include filters on content type, publication date, language, and target audience, among others. This database covers an extremely large range of authors, works, and historical periods, making it an incredibly useful source. An especially helpful feature is the ability to browse by topic, as well as the topic finder, which is useful for discovering essay topics. One limitation is that it lacks the ability to limit your search to just American works, unlike Literature Online.
3. American Fiction, 1774-1920
https://go-gale-com.libproxy.albany.edu/ps/start.do?p=AMFN&u=albanyu
American Fiction, 1773-1920, includes 17,800 American fiction works published during the specified time period. The materials covered are digitized, so you can see what a work published during this time period would have looked like. So many English courses cover classic American fiction, from Mark Twain to Edgar Allan Poe, and this source is particularly useful for finding lesser-known works by American writers. It's clearly limited in scope in regard to time period and form, but the specificity can be helpful when searching for these types of materials. Also, the digitized materials can be more difficult to read than regular webpages (although the historical aspect is a cool feature!).
4. MLA International Bibliography
https://libguides.library.albany.edu/MLAInternational
The MLA International Bibliography helps users find over 3 million records, including citations, books, websites, dissertations, and journals. It covers a range of topics, including linguistics, literature, drama, and publishing. This resource is incredibly helpful for finding literary criticism. While you cannot limit searches to American literature, you can search for specific American authors and find a wealth of writings on their work, which is extremely useful when doing research.
5. Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This database combines two collections: Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. It includes more than 100,000 poems and works from many different poets. Unique search features are the ability filter by authors' gender, ethnicity, nationality, and years living. Highlighting the work of African-Americans is another special feature - white Americans have historically been overrepresented in the literary canon, and this database provides a great way to find more marginalized voices. You'll likely have to take a poetry class during your time in an English program, and this database will be useful for this course's assignments. While it's limited to the twentieth century, it's still a wide range of important work.
View these tutorials to learn about the databases above and how to search in them.