LibGuides: FYWB 1128: Music in Narrative (Weybright): Background Information

Using reference sources to find background information

Consult scholarly reference sources to get an overview of a topic, historical/background information, an introduction to a theory, definitions to discipline-specific terms, and understanding of the landscape of a scholarly discipline, timelines, suggested readings, and more.

Search multiple background sources at one time

You can search across a lot of sources from many disciplines/areas of study at once in these tools.

Credo
Credo is a database of background content. It's full-text and can help you learn the basics of any topic. Start your research here to focus your topic, find keywords and people, and discover more in-depth books and articles
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Gale Virtual Reference Library is a database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
Oxford Reference Library
Brings together digitized entries from Oxford's Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias, spanning multiple subject areas.

Reference sources for music studies

African American Music Reference
African American Music Reference is bringing togther text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database is constantly expanding to include comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.
The Garland encyclopedia of world music online
A comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. Each volume contains an overview of a geographic region, a survey of its musical heritage, and a description of specific musical genres, practices, and performances. Articles include detailed photographs that show musicians, musical instruments, and the cultural context of dances, rituals, and ceremonies. Other images include drawings, maps, and musical examples for further study. Contains the full text of the 10 volume print encyclopedia.

Historical Dictionary of Jazz by John S. Davis
ISBN: 9781538128152
Publication Date: 2020
Historical Dictionary of Jazz, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on musicians, styles of jazz, instruments, recording labels, bands and band leaders, and more.
Keywords in Sound by David Novak (Editor); Matt Sakakeeny (Editor)
ISBN: 9780822359036
Publication Date: 2015-05-12
In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies, and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history, outlines its role in cultural, social and political discourses, and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying and conceptualizing sound, and sets new challenges for the development of sound studies. Contributors. Andrew Eisenberg, Veit Erlmann, Patrick Feaster, Steven Feld, Daniel Fisher, Stefan Helmreich, Charles Hirschkind, Deborah Kapchan, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, David Novak, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Thomas Porcello, Tom Rice, Tara Rodgers, Matt Sakakeeny, David Samuels, Mark M. Smith, Benjamin Steege, Jonathan Sterne, Amanda Weidman

Oxford Music Online
Includes Grove Music Online, The Oxford Companion to Music, and The Oxford Dictionary of Music, all searchable in one place. Also has detailed subject guides on specific topics within music, each with bibliographies. Articles from specialist dictionaries such as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed.

Reference source for Jazz/Toni Morrison

African American Music Reference
African American Music Reference is bringing togther text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database is constantly expanding to include comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.

Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel by Maryemma Graham (Editor)
Call Number: Butler PS374.N4 C36 2004
ISBN: 0521815746
Publication Date: 2004-04-15
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel presents new essays covering the one hundred and fifty year history of the African American novel. Experts in the field from the US and Europe address some of the major issues in the genre: passing, the Protest novel, the Blues novel, and womanism among others. The essays are full of fresh insights for students into the symbolic, aesthetic, and political function of canonical and non-canonical fiction. Chapters examine works by Ralph Ellison, Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and many others. They reflect a range of critical methods intended to prompt new and experienced readers to consider the African American novel as a cultural and literary act of extraordinary significance. Includes a chronology and guide to further reading.
The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison by Justine Tally (Editor)
ISBN: 9780521861113
Publication Date: 2007
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature.
Historical Dictionary of Jazz by John S. Davis
ISBN: 9781538128152
Publication Date: 2020
Historical Dictionary of Jazz, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on musicians, styles of jazz, instruments, recording labels, bands and band leaders, and more.
Keywords for African American Studies by Erica R. Edwards (Editor); Roderick A. Ferguson (Editor); Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar (Editor)
ISBN: 9781479852833
Publication Date: 2018
Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies. As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field.

Oxford African American Studies Center
Comprehensive collection of scholarship focused on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture, coupled with precise search and browse capabilities. Features over 7,500 articles from Oxford's reference works, approximately 100 primary sources with specially written commentaries, over 1,000 images, over 100 maps, over 200 charts and tables, timelines to guide researchers through the history of African Americans and over 6,000 biographies.

Reference sources for Persuasion/Jane Austen

A Companion to Jane Austen by Claudia L. Johnson (Editor); Clara Tuite (Editor)
ISBN: 9780470672389
Publication Date: 2011
Reflecting the dynamic and expansive nature of Austen studies, A Companion to Jane Austen provides 42 essays from a distinguished team of literary scholars that examine the full breadth of the English novelist's works and career. Provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date array of Austen scholarship Functions both as a scholarly reference and as a survey of the most innovative speculative developments in the field of Austen studies. Engages at length with changing contexts and cultures of reception from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, 3 Volume Set by Frederick Burwick (General Editor); Nancy Moore Goslee (Associate Editor); Diane Long Hoeveler (Associate Editor)
ISBN: 9781405188104
Publication Date: 2012
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is a three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction.
Reader's Guide to British History by David Loades (Editor)
Call Number: Online
ISBN: 1579582427
Publication Date: 2003-06-19
For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Reader'sGuide to British Historywebsite. The Reader'sGuide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.
The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen by Cheryl A. Wilson (Editor); Maria H. Frawley (Editor)
ISBN: 9780429675263
Publication Date: 2021
First published anonymously, as 'a lady', Jane Austen is now among the world's most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen's works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world.
Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Joanne Wilkes
ISBN: 9780754698579
Publication Date: 2010
Giving special attention to critical reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes offers in-depth examinations of reviews by eight female critics: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Augusta Ward. What they wrote about women writers, and what their writings tell us about the critics' sense of themselves, reveals the distinctive character of nineteenth-century women's contributions to literary history.