Gale Literature brings together Seattle Central College's two Gale literary databases in a new digital environment that allows researchers, faculty and students to search across these resources to discover and analyze content in entirely new ways.

Gale LitFinder (part of Gale Literature) provides access to literary works and authors throughout history, including full-text poems, plays, short stories, speeches, and more.

Person Search

Gale's Literature's Person Search allows users to locate authors based on their own predetermined criteria - such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, occupation and more.

Simply select search limiters from the available options, like era, author nationality and author gender, or enter a name into the search to generate a list of matching writers or works covered within Gale Literature.

Work Search

Gale's Literature's Work Search allows users to locate literary works based on their own predetermined criteria; such as type of work, original language, author gender, ethnicity and nationality and more.

Simply use the available search limiters to apply search criteria, or enter in a work name in the search bar,  to generate a list of matching writers or works covered within Gale Literature.

Topic Finder

This tool takes the titles, subjects, and approximately the first 100 words from a subset of your top results and feeds them into an algorithm. Keywords shown in the graphics are those found most often in the text with your search term.

The Topic Finder results for “disability narratives” might bring up expected connections from the text like “disability rights,” along with unexpected but commonly related terms like “life” and “gender”. Clicking on one of these related terms quickly leads to a small list of highly relevant search results, such as the overview of "The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the other Side of the Sky" shown in the Topic Finder results below. 

The Topic Finder can be utilized to quickly locate highly relevant, under-represented perspectives with a diverse array of authors.

Research Example: Locating female authors of color for further examination

Begin with "Person Search"

• Add applicable filters to the Person Search limiters:
  • Ethnicity: Asian American
  • Gender: Female
  • Century: 20th & 21st 
• Review Results [250 potential authors]

• Select an author name of interest [Chin, Marilyn]
• Review the search results for Marilyn Chin, including biographies, work overviews, literary works and literature criticism.

• Review biographies such as "How I Got That Name" from Poetry for Students or "Chin, Marilyn" from Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature. Notice that the results include both male and female authors of various ethnicities.
• Consider themes of immigrant assimilation in this author's work further by reading through the critical essays and literary works by the author, such as her poem, "Rhapsody, in Plain Yellow". 

• Continue your search for related authors or works by utilizing the "EXPLORE" panel on the article page.

• Continue your research into Asian American assimilation and it's depiction in literature in other Gale resources, such as Gale in Context: History [Example: topic page: Immigration > search "assimilation"].