Related Guides
Featured Article
- Two Wives and Ten Husbands: A Comparative Reading of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and The Wife of Willesden’s Prologue (DBpia) This paper juxtaposes two literary works, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales (1386-1400) and Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden’s Prologue in The Wife of Willesden (2021).. Download the pdf to read the entire article.
Find Books
Find Articles & Reviews
Theater
- Performing Arts Database This link opens in a new window Performing Arts Database locates citations for writings spanning the disciplines of theatre, dance, and music. These writings chiefly originate in subject-specific trade journals, magazines, and more established scholarly journals. Some full-text is included. Content is international in scope with the majority of the original content having been produced in the United States and Europe. Date coverage: Generally 1990s - present.
- Theatre in Context Collection This link opens in a new window Works by American, European, Asian, and other worldwide dramatists from the past several centuries. In addition to performances, includes documentaries and interviews about theatre, discussing the history of theatre, acting methods, pioneering dramatists and actors, and more.
Literature & Humanities
- Humanities Full Text / Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective This link opens in a new window These combined databases provide access to journal articles, book reviews, performance reviews, interviews, bibliographies and more from a broad range of humanities and social sciences journals. Date coverage: 1907 - present.
- 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.
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) This link opens in a new window Arts & Humanities Citation Index, accessed via Web of Science, provides comprehensive data on bibliographic and citation information. This database allows a researcher to identify which later articles have cited any particular earlier article, or have cited the articles of any particular author, or have been cited most frequently. Searches notable and significant journals across more than 25 disciplines. Date coverage: 1975 - present.
Social Sciences
- Social Sciences Full Text This link opens in a new window Social Sciences Full Text provides access to hundreds of English language journals in the social sciences. About two-thirds of the journals are peer-reviewed. Date coverage: 1983 - 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.
- Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) This link opens in a new window Social Sciences Citation Index, accessed via Web of Science, provides comprehensive data on bibliographic and citation information. This database allows a researcher to identify which later articles have cited any particular earlier article, or have cited the articles of any particular author, or have been cited most frequently. Searches notable and significant journals across more than 50 disciplines. Date coverage: 1965 - present.
Searching 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.
- Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window Academic Search Premier contains indexing, abstracts and full-text articles for scholarly publications, most of them peer-reviewed. The subjects covered include topics in the social sciences, humanities, general science, education and most areas of academic study. Date coverage varies by publication
- Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window Women's Studies International indexes women's studies, women's issues and gender-focused journal and magazine articles, books and book chapters, dissertations and reports worldwide. Date coverage: 1972 - present.
- 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.
Newspapers & Popular Magazines
- ProQuest Recent Newspapers This link opens in a new window Searchable digital archive of recent newspapers that offers full-page images of Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Date coverage: 2008 to 2 months ago.
- Boston Globe 1980+ This link opens in a new window Date coverage: 1980 - present. Searchable, current article text from the Boston Globe (no images, illustrations or charts included). For earlier editions use Boston Globe (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
- Boston Globe (PressReader) Full-page images of current six weeks of the Monday-Saturday Boston Globe and 10/16/2003 until 03/01/2016.
- Boston [Sunday] Globe (PressReader) Full-page images of the Sunday Boston Globe, current six weeks.
- Boston Herald Historical and Current This link opens in a new window Explore Boston history through local news, events and people with Boston Herald Collection. Search current and archived issues with full-color newspaper pages, full-text articles and content only published online. Boston Herald Historical, 1848-1992, supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowment Fund.
- ProQuest News & Newspapers This link opens in a new window ProQuest News & Newspapers allows searching across a wide range of ProQuest newspaper databases include ProQuest Historical Newspapers, International Newsstream, Canadian Major Dailies, Ethnic Newswatch, and the Boston Globe. These databases can also be searched separately.
- PressReader This link opens in a new window Full-page images and article images with searchable full text of international newspapers and magazines from the last 90 days, in the original language. Includes computer-generated translations to English and other languages for some publications.
- Access World News This link opens in a new window Find full-text current and archived articles on issues, events, people, government and more. Includes local news, editorials, announcements and other sections from more than 10,000 sources.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window Nexis Uni is a source for newspapers and magazines, trade journals, wire services and transcripts, as well as legal sources for federal and state cases and statutes, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 1790, and information on U.S. and international companies and executives.
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window Full text articles from newspapers and periodicals published by ethnic, minority and native presses in the U.S. Includes both historic publications, starting in 1959, as well as current ones.
- Readers' Guide / Reader's Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window Readers' Guide indexes hundreds of general interest and specialized magazines dating from the late19th century to the present with full text of articles for more recent publications. Date coverage: Indexing - 1890 - present; full text - 1994 - present.
See also:
- Smith, Wendy. "NSFW: Chaucer's Bawdy Wife of Bath Gets a Modern Makeover in Zadie Smith's 'Wife of Willesden'." Boston Globe (Online), Feb 23 2023 (ProQuest) Chaucer gets a 21st-century reboot in Zadie Smith's rollicking verse drama, which will be playing at the American Repertory Theater's Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge from Feb. 25 to March 18. “The Wife of Willesden” reinvents his Wife of Bath as the much-married Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman holding forth in a pub on Kilburn High Road. The Southwark tavern where Chaucer's pilgrims made their storytelling pact has been moved across the river to Brent, Smith's North London home borough, and the dialogue swaggers with the pungent local accents that have enlivened her novels from “White Teeth” to “Swing Time.”
- Aucoin, Don. "A Free Spirit Soars Beyond Convention in ART's 'the Wife of Willesden': Novelist Zadie Smith Sets a Story from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' in the Present-Day." Boston Globe, Mar 03 2023, (ProQuest). Presented by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, and directed with verve by Indhu Rubasingham, “The Wife of Willesden" is essentially a feat of storytelling about storytelling. Novelist Zadie Smith ("White Teeth") has adroitly adapted Chaucer's 14th-century “The Wife of Bath's Tale," from “The Canterbury Tales," transporting the action from the medieval period to the present day, perhaps to suggest the persistence of misogyny.
- Sinclair, Jacquinn. "In a London Pub, 'the Wife of Willesden' Isn't Holding Back." Boston Globe, Feb 24 2023 (ProQuest) There's a feeling that British actress Clare Perkins gets when she reads an intriguing role, a “fire" of sorts that makes her want to take part. So when she learned of the character Alvita, the leading lady of author and essayist Zadie Smith's book and first play, “The Wife of Willesden," which the American Repertory Theater is presenting Feb. 25-March 17, Perkins knew it would be “a good character to bring to the stage."
- "Theater Medieval manner - Chaucer gets an update in 'Wife of Willesden'." Boston Herald (MA), sec. Features, 19 Feb. 2023, p. 25. (NewsBank: Access World News) Zadie Smith’s reimagining of the Canterbury tale, “The Wife of Willesden,” became a smash hit in 2021 at the Kiln Theatre, which is situated in the Northwest London neighborhood where Smith sets the action. Smith has modernized the tale while keeping the lead character closely connected to Chaucer’s original text — “The Wife of Willesden” makes its stateside debut at the American Repertory Theater Feb. 25 to March 19.
See also:
- Aucoin, Don. "Ingenuity Meets Virtuosity in Manual Cinema's 'Frankenstein'." Boston Globe (Online), Feb 23 2023 (ProQuest) With any given theater production, the audience typically sees the finished product, not the behind-the-scenes process. But Manual Cinema's “Frankenstein” turns that formula on its head by allowing us to see both the logistics and the act of creation simultaneously. The result is a fascinating, freshly imagined take on a horror tale that has been subject to countless adaptations in the two centuries since Mary Shelley wrote it.
- Sullivan, James. "Manual Cinema has Created a Monster, but it's Not Your Typical 'Frankenstein'." Boston Globe, Feb 19 2023. (ProQuest) Before she became a cofounder of the innovative Chicago performance troupe Manual Cinema, Sarah Fornace attended the University of Chicago, where she studied literature and biology. “I always thought I was going to be a scientist," Fornace says, “so getting to play a mad scientist actually is very fun." That would be Dr. Frankenstein. More than a dozen years into Manual Cinema's unique body of work, which combines film, theater, puppetry, music, and sound design, it makes perfect sense to Fornace that she and her colleagues have adapted the classic cautionary tale about the perils of scientific progress.
