English 240: Literature of North Africa and the Middle East > Iraqi Poets Web > Bibliography


Your task here is find as many single-author works by your poet and/or inclusions of your poet’s work in anthologies and journals as you can, and compile these into a bibliography.  (Also include in your bibliography any recordings and films featuring your poet.  Such items, if they exist, may be particularly difficult to track down.)  In some instances, the Gale Literary Databases may have done much of this work for you, while others will require more legwork. But even if you're one of the lucky ones, you mustn't stop with Gale.

For instance, your poet might have work included in the following anthologies owned by the HSU library (please don't check them out):

  • M. M. Badawi, ed.  An Anthology of Modern Arabic Verse.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.  PJ 7661 .A68  (All the poems are printed in Arabic, though Badawi's "Introduction," which explains the emergence of contemporary poetry in relation to the immediately preceding trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is in English.)
  • Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar, eds. and trans. An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.  PJ 7695 E3 K48  (Khouri and Algar also provide another valuable "Introduction" to the history and prosody of modern Arabic poetry.)
  • Issa J. Boullata, ed. and trans.  Modern Arab Poets, 1950-1975.  Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1976.  PJ 7695 E3 M6  (Boullata's short "Introduction" places the poetic achievements of the post-1950 "free-verse" poets in the socio-political context of the modern Arab world.)
  • Abdullah al-Udhari, ed. and trans.  Modern Poetry of the Arab World.  Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986.  PJ 7694 .E3 M65 1986  (Al-Udhari's "Introduction" explains his division of modern Arabic poetry into three broad "schools.")
  • Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed.  Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology.  New York: Columbia UP, 1987.  PJ 7694 .E3 M64 1987
  • Nathalie Handal, ed. The Poetry of Arab Women : a Contemporary Anthology. New York: Interlink, 2001. PJ7694.E3 P64 2001

You mustn't limit your research to HSU's library, though, as it may not necessarily have much by these writers.  How else would you find such things?  You might come across bibliographic references in the single-author volumes and/or anthologies that you turn up. Bibliographic info may also be found in critical works about your poet, or even on the Web (but be wary).  In the latter two instances, you'll want to consult other members of your team.  But you will certainly need to refer to comprehensive databases that catalog books held by other libraries (WorldCat) and that index items published in journals (Academic Search, ArticleFirst, JSTOR, MLA Bibliography and Project Muse).  You might also check the catalog of the British Library (to find items that may only have been published in the UK).  And you never know what a search of a national on-line bookseller like Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk will turn up.  

When all else fails, hoof it down to the library and pore over some reference books.  The following, for instance, are all in the Reference section on the main floor, not in the stacks.  (This is not an exhaustive list; you may find other useful works on your own.)

  • Benson, Eugene and L. W. Conolly. The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 1994. HSU Main Reference PR9080.A52 E53 1994 (vol.1) and PR9080.A52 E53 1994 (vol. 2)
  • Fister, Barbara.  Third World Women's Literatures: A Dictionary and Guide to Materials in English.  Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995.  HSU Main Reference PN 849 .U43 F58 1995
  • Meisami, Julie Scott and Paul Starkey.  Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 1998.  (HSU Main Reference PJ7510 .E53 1998 vols.1 and 2)
  • Serafin, Stephen R., ed.  Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century.  4 vols.  Detroit: St. James, 1999.  HSU Main Reference PN771 .E5 1999
Compile and collate all the citations you've assembled, and put some thought into how to arrange them. (I'd recommend subsections for "Volumes of Poetry," "Poems Collected in Anthologies," "Poems in Journals," and "Other Work" (the latter category for fiction, essays, and so on).)  How should your entries be formatted?  MLA Style (as outlined in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed.).  Capital Community College in Hartford, CT has an excellent web-based introduction to MLA Style.
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