Reference links

  This is primarily a class about reading literature.  Still, since most of our readings come from unfamiliar places and historical periods, you'll inevitably encounter a lot of new information.  On the other hand, you'll notice that even an edition with footnotes will leave many things unexplained.
    What are you expected to do about all this?  Not to know everything in advance--and not to remember it all now and become a Nobel contender in European history.  (That might be a doomed enterprise in any case.) 
    You need to judge in each case whether it's worth your time to remember information, or indeed whether it's worth your time to look for it in the first place.

    Words that seem especially important in a text are probably worth looking up in the Oxford English Dictionary if you're puzzled about what they mean. 

    If you're reading, you've been completely lost for the last two or three pages, and re-reading the passage doesn't help, try looking for a name or word in the passage you could look up.  

    If you think more information about the author might help, there are reliable and often quite interesting articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    If you're curious about our historical periods in general, see what's in the library reserve.

    Otherwise, you should write down your questions and raise them in class.

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These resources are part of the Caltech library collection, so you'll be prompted for your ITS username and password when you connect.

Oxford English Dictionary
    (Enter your word in either of the two search boxes and choose "Find Word.")
    This dictionary not only arranges a word's meanings in a historical order, with the earliest meanings listed first--it provides dated quotations so that you can see how the word was used in sentences at different times.  As a result, the more eventful a word's history has been, the more prodigiously long you'll find the dictionary entry.

Encyclopedia Britannica
    (Use the search box at the top, and choose to search only in "Encyclopaedia Britannica" proper.)
    The article on "English Literature" is fairly good; for example, for the poems we read on January 18 and 25, you might see the sections "Literature and the age" and "Elizabethan poetry and prose" under the subheading "The Renaissance period: 1550-1660."  For articles on individual authors, usefulness varies.  For example, the article on Plato is probably too long and technical to be helpful, but the article on Castiglione is short and illuminating.  These articles tend to focus on the author's writings.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
    (Search on "biography of a person," and use only the person's surname; first names can cause a problem.  This contains articles for essentially everyone we've ever heard of in the British Isles, though it does not include living people.)
    These are often far more enjoyable to read than their counterparts in Encyclopedia Britannica; they typically focus on biography and reputation, only rarely offering any intensive analysis of an author's writings.

Library reserve
Course home page