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Finding Books at Mugar Library
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You can use the BU Libraries Search box to look for print and electronic resources available thru the Boston University Libraries. These resources include print books and journals available in the library stacks, as well as e-books and full-text journal articles.
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For physical items, you will need the call number and library location to locate the books or journals in the stacks. See the Mugar location chart (available by the elevators and at the research center) to help you find the floor by call number range.
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Postmodern Literature and Race by
Postmodernism Literature and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and postracial futures. With essays on a wide range of contemporary writers, including Bernadine Evaristo, Alasdair Gray, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Broken Mirrors: Representations of Apocalypses and Dystopias in Popular Culture by
Dystopian stories and visions of the Apocalypse are nothing new; however in recent years there has been a noticeable surge in the output of this type of theme in literature, art, comic books/graphic novels, video games, TV shows, etc. The reasons for this are not exactly clear; it may partly be as a result of post 9/11 anxieties, the increasing incidence of extreme weather and/or environmental anomalies, chaotic fluctuations in the economy and the uncertain and shifting political landscape in the west in general. Investigating this highly topical and pervasive theme from interdisciplinary perspectives this volume presents various angles on the main topic through critical analyses of selected works of fiction, film, TV shows, video games and more.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2019
Zombie Theory: A Reader by
Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero's The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie's ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties--ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism--has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other. Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community Colle≥ Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong'o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2017
Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis by
Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2017
Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change by
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth's atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth's ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism's theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Search for Articles - Subject Databases
Search across disciplines
- BU Libraries Search (BULS) This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles. Date coverage: earliest issues of each journal up to the most current five years for most publications and to the present for some.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new window Project Muse provides digital access to scholarly journals and books in the humanities and social sciences. The scholarly content comes from non-profit scholarly publishers, including university presses and societies. The full text resources include journal articles, book reviews and book chapters.
Humanities and Social Sciences Databases
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Includes citations from worldwide publications: periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies. Date coverage: 1920s - present.
- Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
- Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window Contains critical and biographical essays on authors currently living or who died after Jan. 1, 2000. May be searched simultaneously with Contemporary Authors and the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
- Communication & Mass Media Complete (CMMC) This link opens in a new window CMMC indexes journals covering communication, mass media, linguistics, discourse, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication theory, language, logic, organizational communication and other closely related fields of study. Date coverage: 1915 - present.
- APA PsycINFO This link opens in a new window PsycInfo provides access to journal articles, books and book chapters, and dissertations that cover the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences. It includes material of relevance to psychologists and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work. Date coverage: 1894-
- Anthropology Plus This link opens in a new window Anthropology Plus provides worldwide coverage of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works and obituaries in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and related interdisciplinary fields. Date coverage: late 19th century - present.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window Sociological Abstracts indexes and abstracts the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews. It also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Forty percent of the content is published outside of North America. Date coverage: 1952 - present.
- Environment Complete This link opens in a new window Environment Complete is a comprehensive database focused on all aspects of environmental science including conservation, biodiversity, climate, pollution, agriculture and aquaculture, environmental law and policy, urban planning, environmental engineering, and more. Date coverage: 1940 - present with selected full text from 1975 - present.
- Political Science Database This link opens in a new window Political Science Database gives users access to hundreds of leading political science, public policy, and international relations journals. It also includes thousands of recent full-text doctoral dissertations on political science topics, together with working papers, conference proceedings, country reports, policy papers and other sources. Coverage: 1985 - current
