This release of Literature Online Reference Edition now includes the first batch of volumes from the Companions to Literature series from Cambridge University Press. Over 50 volumes from this acclaimed series of critical texts, containing well over 700 individual essays, are now fully searchable and readable alongside Literature Online Reference Edition’s extensive collection of full-text journals.

The Companions to Literature are a highly valued series of volumes on a whole range of literary themes, periods, writers and movements. Each volume is edited by a leading scholar in the field and presents specially-commissioned essays written by experts. Designed principally for the student reader, each Companion presents clear and insightful analysis and a critical contemporary evaluation of the topic at hand. For the author Companions each writer is placed in literary and historical context; their major works are analysed and their influence on later writers assessed. The generic and topical Companions cover periods of English literature such as Old English or the Victorian Novel, and literary genres such as Modernism or Greek Tragedy, giving the student vital contextual information about political, social, religious and artistic relationships.

To access this content you can search via the Criticism search page or browse a list of volumes and constituent essays from the link in the Complete Contents. This release features over 50 volumes from the series including Companions to Chaucer, Contemporary Irish Poetry, Gothic Fiction, Kafka, Mary Shelley and Robert Frost. Forthcoming releases of Literature Online Reference Edition will include still more from this renowned series of key critical works.

[13 January 2012]

The latest release of Literature Online Reference Edition sees the addition of 25 new or revised biographies, including biographies for Lascelles Abercrombie, Peter Gill, Václav Havel, Christopher Logue, Mary Seacole, and Christa Wolf. Literature Online Reference Edition now contains over 4,500 biographies. Author biographies are specially commissioned for Literature Online Reference Edition, and give an authoritative and accessible overview of the author's life, work and critical reception. These biographies can be found by following links from Author Pages, by using Search: Reference, or simply by entering an author's name in Quick Search.

Literature Online Reference Edition now contains over 17,900 author records. Each of our author records contains at least one of the following: an authoritative and accessible biography, a comprehensive bibliography of primary works or a list of full-text critical and reference materials relating to the author. Author records can be accessed by searching in the Search: Authors or from the Quick Search feature from any page.

[13 January 2012]