Using Twayne Authors Series

Twayne Authors Series is a database available in the Library in which you may find complete texts of literary criticism and biography on close to 600 authors, covering different historical periods, literary genres and nationalities. It is divided into three series:  World Authors, English Authors and United States Authors.

Finding information in Twayne Authors Series

To view the series individually select Research Ideas from the home screen.  Selecting any of the individual series will bring you to a menu that organizes the series according to historical period, literary genre, and topic. For example, if you select United States Authors you may browse through a list of profiles  on African-American Writers, Women Writers, and Children’s Writers. You may also select from a list of writers from Early Twentieth Century to World War II and World War II to 1960.  

Twayne Authors Series also allows you to access all of the Series simultaneously through alphabetical, and subject-driven searching. To find information on a specific author select Authors A-Z from the main menu and choose from the alphabetical list.  From this screen you also have the option of selecting Books on Special Topics. This will provide information on specific literary genres and historical periods, such as Native American Literature and Arthurian Legends.  If you need to do more precise searching  you have the option of selecting the In Depth Search, which will allow you to select from a series of drop-down including qualifiers like gender, time period, and nationality.  This will allow you, for example, to only look for information on female French novelists from the twentieth century. To select more than one option in an individual search field hold down the Control key (Ctrl) when clicking on the mouse.

Viewing, saving, and printing  information in Twayne Authors Series

The information that you will find Twayne Authors Series consists of book-length coverage on the given subject matter. Because the documents are so large, each individual profile is arranged book format: if you click on Table of Contents, you will see a listing of links to chapter headings and subchapter headings. This allows you to skip ahead in the document through hypertext links. In addition to the main coverage, you also have the option of viewing a chronology of the author’s life, a list of the author’s works and a bibliography of major works written about the author. Twayne Authors Series also provides a complete citation for the book and   easy to access footnotes and a bibliography for each chapter. As the documentation in Twayne Authors Series is very lengthy it is important that you utilize the “Print Preview” function on your browser before you send a document to the printer. This will allow you to specify a specific page range for the print job. When saving be to a diskette be certain that you select “3 ½ Floppy (A)”. Do not save to the desktop. Also make certain that you type in “.txt” as the file extension (example: blake.txt.)You may also select specific blocks of text and copy and paste to WordPad or Netscape Composer to be printed or saved to a diskette. When you do this it is important that you copy and paste the citation for the book as well. For further questions regarding Twayne Authors Series please consult with a librarian.

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