Finding Literary Works in LION

Searching by Work: Single Work

Choosing "Texts" from home page menu will open the "Search : Texts" screen.

LION offers a Keword search of all its full text. By including a Title or Author you can limit the search to one work or to all works by an author.

In Keyword searching of full texts, standard connectors like "and" and "or" may retrieve too many matches. A better option is to use Lion's proximity indicator "near" which looks for terms within 10 words of each other (or define your own proximity: "near.5").

For example, if you recall a novel that speaks of people being "wadded" with "stupidity," you can enter these Keywords with the "near" connector.

The search pinpoints the passage to Chapter XX of George Eliot's novel Middlemarch -- and links to the full text.

Or you might remember a Wordsworth poem referred to as the "Ode on Immortality" or the "Immortality Ode," though you think both are abbreviations of the actual title.

If you're not sure of the wording, use connectors between your search terms. If you simply enter the terms, LION interprets these as an exact phrase search -- and neither of the above guesses will retrieve anything.

Since you are searching titles rather than full text, an "and" connector will probably be safe.

This search retrieves 4 works, the first of which is the Wordsworth poem often referred to by a shortened title.

Searching by Work: Work Categories

To search literary works by category, click on "Advanced search options" at the bottom of the "Search : Texts" screen.

Advanced search allows you to define up to 7 categories for the works and authors retrieved.

Nationality, Ethnicity, Literary Movement, and Literary Period all use a predefined vocabulary, so be sure to click on the "select from a list" links to see the options -- sampled below.

For example, you might want to see all LION full text for American women writers of the nineteenth century associated with Romanticism.

This retrieves 593 poems by American women Romantics of the nineteenth century, beginning with the works of Emily Dickinson.
Also note that LION retrieves 277 Web texts associated with American women Romantics.