The Handbook to Literary Research

Delia da Sousa Correa, W. R. Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135219116
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

The Handbook to Literary Research is a practical guide for students embarking on postgraduate work in Literary Studies. It introduces and explains research techniques, methodologies and approaches to information resources, paying careful attention to the differences between countries and institutions, and providing a range of key examples.

This fully updated second edition is divided into five sections which cover:

• tools of the trade – a brand new chapter outlining how to make the most of literary resources
• textual scholarship and book history – explains key concepts and variations in editing, publishing and bibliography
• issues and approaches in literary research – presents a critical overview of theoretical approaches essential to literary studies
• the dissertation – demonstrates how to approach, plan and write this important research exercise
• glossary – provides comprehensive explanations of key terms, and a checklist of resources.

Packed with useful tips and exercises and written by scholars with extensive experience as teachers and researchers in the field, this volume is the ideal Handbook for those beginning postgraduate research in literature.

1
Introduction to the Handbook

Delia da Sousa Correa and W.R. Owens

Undertaking any programme of postgraduate study or piece of independent research work in literature is both an exciting and a daunting prospect. The aim of this Handbook is to make the whole process of research more exciting and less daunting - and, we might add, more productive and more rewarding. How are we to do this?

• First, by introducing you to the range of research skills and methods needed by anyone who wants to do the job effectively and productively.

• Second, by offering you a broad survey of the wide variety of intellectual endeavour that now characterises the study of literature at postgraduate level.

• Third, by providing advice and guidance on what is frequently the most tricky (and most postponed) part of research - writing up the dissertation or thesis.

• Fourth, by giving you a substantial quantity of useful and usable information in the form of a glossary and a large bibliographical Checklist.

Although you could certainly gain something by dipping into the book, you may well find it better to start by reading Parts 1-4 in sequence as they build steadily from learning about research resources to writing the final dissertation.

The Handbook is designed to provide guidance on basic techniques for anyone wishing to undertake literary research. In practice, the skills and knowledge required to complete an MA successfully are the same as those needed by students beginning a research degree (an MPhil or PhD) and, indeed, by anyone in or outside higher education wishing to pursue independent research in literature. There are, of course, significant differences in the scope of the projects to which you apply these skills at different levels, and you will find a useful discussion of the transition from a Master’s degree to a PhD in Chapter 11 on ‘Planning, writing and presenting a dissertation or thesis’.

The chapters in the Handbook have certain characteristics in common: they all include the identification of key ideas and texts within their subject; they all involve discussion of the significant developments in their field; they all discuss the specific nature of research within their subject; and they all include a set of ‘Questions and exercises’ designed to get you to practise the knowledge and skills to which you have been introduced in each chapter. At the same time the Handbook has a variety of voices because of the wide range of authors who have contributed to it, and we hope that you will find this stimulating and refreshing.

STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF THE HANDBOOK

Part 1: tools of the trade

Every postgraduate student needs, like any apprentice, to understand and to be able to use effectively the tools of his or her trade. Part 1 is an introduction to the basic research methodologies of literature, and in particular to the range of skills associated with the effective use of research resources. It covers both the use of electronic resources - discussing the impact of digitisation, hypertext and the development of other electronic resources - and of the research libraries which remain crucial to academic research (by ‘research library’ we mean a university library, or a major city library, or one of the great national libraries). The chapter includes a list of practical exercises which will help you test your growing competence in this set of key skills.

Parts 2 and 3: textual scholarship and book history/issues and approaches in literary research

Over the past half-century or so, literary research has been enriched and complicated by approaches that have broadened our sense of what counts as literary study. At the same time, the increasing availability of electronic resources has contributed to an expansion of the materials and techniques available to literary researchers. The arrival of these new approaches and materials has tended to modify rather than exclude the more traditional forms of study; this has resulted in a rich but potentially confusing range of approaches to literary research from which to choose. One of the aims of this Handbook is to provide a brief guide to what a student might choose in terms of approach, from two broad perspectives.

• Part 2, ‘Textual scholarship and book history’, is concerned with the more historical and empirical aspects of literary study and deals with classic bib liography in all its variety, with the newer subject of book history, and with the disciplines of scholarly editing. Although these subjects are discussed in discrete chapters, their interconnectedness is made clear.

• Part 3 moves you on to a different set of approaches and issues of relevance to literary research and to the development of ‘English’ as an academic discipline. The overall emphasis in these chapters is on how an awareness of literary history, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, other media and issues of translation can inform your own research. They aim to help you to develop an awareness of disciplinary history, disciplinary boundaries and issues of translation (in a broad as well as a linguistically specific sense), so that you are equipped to appreciate and engage with the expansion of the discipline of English to encompass work in Comparative and World Literature and its overlapping relationships with other disciplinary areas including Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Music and Fine Arts.

Part 4: planning and completing a research project

When the area of study has been selected, the approach understood and the tools of the trade sharpened, the job itself is still to be done. The ultimate aim of most literary research is to produce some critical, theoretical or historical writing. In most cases such work takes the form of a thesis or dissertation. In Part 4 we offer a sizeable chapter specifically on ‘Planning, writing and presenting a dissertation or thesis’. This includes down-to-earth advice on choosing a topic, preparing a research proposal, writing the dissertation or thesis and ensuring that it is properly presented.

In part, learning to write in a scholarly way is about acquiring good writing habits early. For example, you should train yourself, whenever in a piece of writing you refer to the origin of your information, to provide the necessary evidence in terms of a properly referenced source. When making notes, you should always record the exact location of your information - including page numbers so that, if you or anyone else wanted to check that information, it could be done quickly and accurately. None of this is very complicated, but it does require you to understand and use the ‘scholarly conventions’. These are discussed in Chapter 11, and you should make sure that you get the hang of them as soon as possible and practise them as much as you can.

Part 5: reference

Any subject, even one that should pride itself on the clarity and exactness of its language, will need occasionally to use specific terminology and abbreviations, and literature is no exception. For this reason we have provided a short Glossary, Chapter 12, explaining terms used in this book which you are likely to encounter in your further research.

Chapter 13, the ‘Checklist of libraries, print, online and other research resources’ is perhaps that part of the Handbook to which you will return most frequently throughout your period of research. It is a vital companion piece to Chapter 2. Whereas Chapter 2 discusses methodology, the question of how you go about your research, Chapter 13 is a reference list which helps you to identify what the resources are that you might need to consult. It lists, describes and occasionally discusses the huge variety of databases, catalogues, bibliographies, dictionaries and multifarious other reference works - in printed and electronic versions - without which literary research as a scholarly discipline would hardly be possible. As with every other chapter of this book, the Checklist cannot hope to be comprehensive. But it should provide you with a good introduction to the most important material, and will give you plenty of leads that you can follow up in your own research library or via the Internet.

THE HANDBOOK AND HOW TO USE IT

This Handbook is not designed merely to be read once, as an introduction: it is meant to accompany you from start to finish. For this reason we don’t just tell you how to go about literary research, we also show you how to do it and provide you with much of the initial material that you will need.

Postgraduate work in literature, as in any subject, is about becoming more intellectually independent. This means that you spend much less time in a seminar room with a prescribed and restricted range of texts, and much more time using research resources and libraries and working through an extended list of texts that you yourself, to a large extent, have compiled. Three features of the Handbook are particularly designed to foster this spirit of independent enquiry and discovery - guided reading, questions and exercises, and textual examples - and it is worth saying a word about each.

Guided reading

One of the Handbook’s main functions is to send you off to read extensively and critically. For this reason there is a strong emphasis on what we think of as ‘guided reading’, and you will find numerous relevant publications cited within the text of each chapter. Each chapter also ends with a list of ‘Suggested reading’: lists of books, articles and other material relevant to the topic under discussion that you should try to consult. Your choice of further reading will of course be based on what is most relevant to your own field of enquiry. It will also, of necessity, be influenced by what is available. Despite the ever-increasing quantity of digitised material now accessible, students still have to contend with limitations on what they are able to obtain via the combined resources of the Internet and even the best research libraries. This is especially true of printed books, and while electronic journal publication now makes it possible to access articles more easily than book-length texts, books remain a crucial resource for the study of literature.

Questions and exercises

Another recurrent feature of this Handbook is the section entitled ‘Questions and exercises’ included at the end of each chapter. These sections are designed to give you practice in using the knowledge and skills that you will have just acquired. As with the reading lists, we have tried to offer a range of choices so that, whatever your intellectual interests and library resources, you should be able to find one question that interests you or, at least, is do-able. At the most basic level these ‘Questions and exercises’ illustrate the sorts of scholarly problem with which specialists in the field are preoccupied.

However, such questions will be much more beneficial if you actually try to answer one or two of them. This is not a trivial point: it is very easy to believe, having read something, that you understand it. But the acid test is whether you are then able to put that understanding and knowledge into your own words. If you are able to do so, then you can move on in the comforting knowledge that you really have grasped the key points of what you have been reading and have made the information your own.

Writing an answer does not necessarily mean producing a full, formal essay: your answer could be in the form of notes or an essay plan. Nevertheless, answering one or two of the questions in the Handbook by means of a formal essay would be a very good idea indeed. You should certainly put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard whenever you can in response to ‘Questions and exercises’. As you will learn again and again as you work through the Handbook, the early and frequent practice of good scholarly writing is the key to producing a successful dissertation or thesis.

Textual examples

The final feature that binds the whole Handbook together is the focus on textual examples; you will find a wide variety used to illustrate the discussions within individual chapters. Providing explanations, presenting information and offering practice is what this Handbook is all about. Used properly, it should provide you at the outset with a quick and clear introduction to literary research and, later on, offer you support and guidance as your scholarly confid...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction to the Handbook
• Part 1 Tools of the trade
• Part 2 Textual scholarship and book history
• Part 3 Issues and approaches in literary research
• Part 4 Planning and completing a research project
• Part 5 Reference
• Index