Washington and Lee University Research Guides: LIT 220: Modern Chinese Literature in Translation: Finding Secondary Sources

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What Are Secondary Sources?

For both papers in this class, you will be required to engage with both your primary text(s) and secondary sources.

What does this mean exactly?

Your primary texts are the literary translations you're engaging with in class. Example: Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City.

In this case, secondary sources are works that critically analyze and/or posit arguments concerning primary texts. Example: "Eileen Chang's Cross-Cultural Writing and Rewriting in Love in a Fallen City"

Mostly, you will find secondary sources in the form of academic articles. Academic articles are "findable" through the Library Catalog as well as directly through specific databases: like JStor and MLA International Bibliography.

Using the Library Catalog

The Library Catalog, accessible through the library's website at library.wlu.edu, serves as a portal to the library's books, ebooks, journals, and multimedia content.

To find only academic journal articles within the Library Catalog,

conduct your search as you would normally,
use the provided filters on the left side of the results screen to limit by Availability = "Peer Reviewed Journals" and Material Type = "Articles."

Recommended Databases

To find secondary sources, you can also go directly to library provided databases. Databases aggregate and make accessible content. Some databases are subject specific, like MLA International Bibliography, which indexes scholarship related to modern languages and literature. Some databases are very broad in scope: like JStor.

Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Coverage of over 2,000 journals in history, film studies, religion, philosophy, and other fields within the humanities.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A digital archive of over 1,100 important scholarly journals. All issues of each journal are included in full-text except for the most recent 2-to-5 years, based on JSTOR's agreement with the journal's publisher.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature.
The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2.2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Department of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. Such international coverage is represented by literature from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, and while the majority of records are from English-language publications, at least sixty other languages are represented including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish.
The database also has an identifiable subset of more than 100,000 records that constitute the JSTOR subfile. This consists of citation records for documents in JSTOR's Language and Literature Collection as well as relevant articles from their Asian Studies collection. The documents date back as far as 1881 and contain direct links to the full-text articles on the JSTOR website.
Our subscription to the MLA International Bibliography also includes access to the MLA Directory of Periodicals database. Full text links to Project Muse journal and ProQuest Digital Dissertations are also included in this database. Subject coverage: Modern literatures, Literary theory and criticism, Linguistics, Teaching of language, Film, television and theater, Rhetoric and composition, History of the book, Folklore.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Full-text access to about 600 journals from academic publishers.

Interlibrary Loan

The Library can't own or subscribe to every piece of research ever created...that's why we have interlibrary loan!

If you need to use an article or book not in the library's collection, place an interlibrary loan request. The University Library can borrow materials from libraries across the globe.