ProQuest One Literature offers numerous Look ups (a.k.a., browsable indexes), so you can easily find spelling or format variations of, for example, an author's name or a journal title. You can find the Look up links on the advanced search pages (All Literature Cotent, Primary Texts, Poetry, Drama, Prose, and Criticism, ABELL) and available look ups vary by search page. The following is a complete list of all available look ups:
For a description of these fields, please see the searchable fields table to the right.
To use and locate a Look up or browsable index, select the field from the advanced search pull-down menu. If a Look up is available, under the search row you will see a link to the Look up. Other Look ups and browsable indexes will be listed in the Limit To section of the advanced search page.
Select the Look up link and then you will see a browsable and alphabetical index for that field. There are some indexes that will not display an alphabetical list before searching for the term, rather you will have to enter a term first, and then the alphabetical list of matches will display.
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Work type definitions (RTYPE)
Field Name |
Label |
Search Examples & Explanation |
Accession Number |
AN |
AN(2005580185) A unique number that identifies a specific document. |
Anywhere |
ALL |
ALL(teaching Dante) ALL searches anywhere in the document, including the full text whenever is available. |
Anywhere except Full Text |
NOFT |
NOFT(Dante) searches anywhere in the document, except the full text whenever is available. |
Author |
AU |
AU(Almond Ian) AU(Geoffrey Chaucer) Use to find documents or works written by a particular author. Try searching on both the full first name and initials in order to retrieve all publications by a specific author, or search for last name only for a broader search. Recommended using the look up list. |
Author as subject |
SAU |
SAU(Samuel Beckett) Person who is the subject of the document. Note that this field also contains the titles of anonymous works, folk works and other works that lack an identified author, e.g. 'Beowulf', 'The Sopranos'. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Author's work
|
SWK |
SWK("Waiting for Godot") Work of literature discussed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Content Type |
CTYPE |
CTYPE("LitCur") for Author Pages Content Types codes are: LitCrit (Criticism); LitTexts (Primary Texts); LitCur (Author Pages); LitRef (Reference Works); LitMedia (Audio and Video); LitDiss (Dissertations) Available as complex limiter box in Advanced Search and as a Narrow Filter in the Results Page. |
Document Text |
FT |
FT(jealous lover) FT searches in the complete text of the document |
Document Title |
TI
|
TI(Determiner Phrase and Definiteness in Old High German) TI(Taming the shrew) Locates the occurrence of search words in the title of the document. |
Document Type |
DTYPE |
DTYPE(book) The document's type - Book (monograph, collection of essays, or article within), Dissertation abstract, (Scholarly) edition, Journal article, Translation or Website, Discography/Filmography, Dissertation/Thesis, Ethnography/Culture, Film, Website/Webcast, Working paper/pre-print. For ABELL the Doc types are: Article, Book, Review |
Ethnicity |
ETH |
ETH(Hispanic-american) Search for works created by authors of a specific ethnicity. It is important to note that the vast majority of authors in Literature Online have not been indexed by ethnicity. This search will only retrieve hits for those authors who belong to one of the ethnic groups which we have selected for inclusion in our database. These ethnicities have been selected on the grounds that their cultures have become significant areas of study for literary and cultural scholars. |
Folklore Topic |
FLK |
FLK(ethnomusicology) Subject in folklore studies addressed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Genre |
GEN |
GEN(science fiction) Literary genre addressed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
International Standard Book Number (ISBN) |
ISBN |
ISBN(0820472077) This search field looks for the 12 and 13 digit International Standard Book Number (ISBN), where available. Hyphens are optional. |
International Standard Serials Number (ISSN) |
ISSN |
ISSN(0002-7294) This search field looks for the eight digit International Standard Serials Number (ISSN), where available. Hyphens are optional. |
Language of publication |
PLB |
PLB(Spanish) |
Linguistics Topic |
LIN |
LIN(phonetics) Subject in linguistics addressed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Literary Influence |
LIF |
LIF(feminist writers) Person or thing that has been influenced by the subject defined in the classification. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Literary Movement |
LTM |
LTM(HUMANISM) Search for works defined by a particular style or writing, group of writers, or other influencing factors. Many of these terms, such as "Pre-Raphaelitism", were used by the authors themselves. Others, such as "Metaphysical Poets", were only later applied to groups of authors by critics. In these cases we have taken current critical usage into account in assigning authors to movements. In particular, the terms "Lesbian/Gay writing, 1885-", "Feminist Writers, 1900-", and "Postcolonialism, 20th Century" include many authors who did not announce themselves as homosexual, feminist or postcolonialist, but whose work has been discussed in relation to those themes. |
Literary Period |
LTP |
LTP("Middle English Period") Search for works written during a defined period of literary history. All authors in Literature Online have been indexed by literary period, with each author being assigned to the period(s) in which he or she flourished. To be included in a given period, an author must have produced either a substantial amount of work, or some of his/her most well-known work within the dates of that period. |
Literary Source |
LSO |
LSO(bible) Person or thing that has influenced the subject defined in the classification. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Literary Theme |
LTH |
LTH(cowboy) Theme addressed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Literature Topic | GLT |
GLT(Arthurian legend) Subject in literary studies addressed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Subject Heading |
MAINSUBJECT |
MAINSUBJECT(yoga) This field can only be searched if the database has a thesaurus. The prefix MAINSUBJECT.EXACT will be added to your search when you select the term from the Thesaurus. MAINSUBJECT is a way to limit to the subject heading originating from the thesaurus and does not include the use of terms coming from the location index, person index, company index or other classification terms. To search on terms that incorporate all of these subject and index terms, please use the Subject Heading field (SU). |
Nationality |
NAT |
NAT("South Asian") NAT(Caribbean) Nationality of the person or works adressed in the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
National Literature |
NL |
NT(Turkish literature) Use the National Literature field to search for subject terms relating to specific national literatures, e.g. 'German literature'. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Performance Medium |
MED |
MED(film) Film, theater, opera, television, or radio as subject of the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Period |
TIM |
TIM(1900-1999) Span of one or several hundred years as appropriate to the subject. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Place |
LOC |
LOC(Australia) Geographic subject of the document. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Publication Title |
PUB |
PUB(Acta Linguistica Asiatica) Use to search by a specific publication or publications. Alternatively use the look up facility to select specific titles. |
Publication Year |
YR |
YR(2008) Use to search documents from a specific year or years. Remember to use an OR operator when searching for more than one year. Alternatively use the Date range under the Search options. |
Publisher Abstract |
ABS |
ABS(courtroom drama) Publisher Abstracts were made available to users with the April 2008 upload. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Serials Title |
SR |
SR(Contemporary North American Poetry Series) Use to retrieve books from a series. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
All Subject and Indexing |
SU |
SU(ethnic stereotypes) Controlled vocabulary words, names, or phrases that describe what the document is about. For more targeted subject searching, use subject sub-fields such as MAINSUBJECT or Author as Subject or Work as subject. Applies to the Criticism content type only. |
Subject Language |
SLN |
SLN(French language) Language the document is about. Applies to the Criticism content type. |
Update |
UD |
UD(201207) When the document was added to the database. |
Work Type |
RType |
rtype(sonnet) Type of works between Poems and Plays. See list of terms in the box on the left and the definitions/Scope notes in the 2 boxes below |
These notes represent the criteria that we have used in assigning poems to poem types. The list of types we have identified includes both fixed verse forms and looser poetic genres and forms. For each poem type, our aim is to identify every poem in Literature Online that belongs to that category; however, as the service contains over 344,000 poems, this is inevitably a long-term project, and we will continue adding new types, and adding more poems to existing types, as part of ongoing regular updates of the service.
Acrostic
A poem in which the first letters of each line spell out a name, an alphabetical sequence or a hidden message.
Allegory
A text, usually in narrative form, that has a hidden meaning in addition to its apparent meaning. This will generally take the form of personification, in which human characters represent abstract qualities such as vices or virtues; in addition, the story itself, or the places, animals or objects that feature in it, may have a symbolic significance, and fictional characters may be used to represent real, historical or mythical characters.
Alliterative Revival
English poems from the fourteenth century that use alliterative metre, a form inherited from Old English poetry and characterised by the alliteration of stressed syllables within an unrhymed verse line, e.g.:
In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne,
I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were
(Langland, Piers the Plowman)
Aubade
A song or lyric poem in which a speaker (usually male) laments the arrival of the dawn, heralding his imminent separation from his lover. Modern poems on the theme of dawn that consciously draw on the aubade tradition have also been included.
Ballad
A traditional form of anonymous narrative poetry which, in its most typical form, employs a four-line stanza, with three or four stresses in each line, and (often) a strong element of repetition. The most common metrical form is 'common measure', which has alternate lines of four and three stresses, with an abab or abcb rhyme scheme. We have included in this category the contents of standard collections of anonymous ballads such as Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98), Thomas Percy'sReliques (1767) and Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border(1802). In addition, we have included modern authored poems that invoke or adhere closely to ballad forms and conventions.
Carol
A hymn, usually of a rejoicing nature, associated with Christmas or Easter.
Complaint
A poem in which the speaker laments or protests against the cruelty of fate; this includes satirical works, didactic poems and plaintive love poems.
Concrete poem
A genre of poetry that developed in the 1950s, featuring unorthodox typographical layouts in which characters and/or fragments of words are arranged on the page as a form of abstract visual art. Concrete poems are not designed to be read aloud; in fact, they are usually impossible to read out. In some cases the shape in which the characters are arranged will be suggestive of the theme of the poem; however, poems that explicitly take the shape of the object they describe have instead been classified under the heading 'Shape/pattern poem'.
Dialogue
A poem in any genre or form that consists entirely of a dialogue between two characters.
Dramatic monologue
A form of poetry that developed in the Victorian period, in which the entire poem is in the voice of a fictional or historical character who is addressing a silent listener or audience. It is the presence of this implied listener that makes the monologue 'dramatic' and distinguishes it from a soliloquy. In many of the most characteristic examples of the dramatic monologue, such as those by Tennyson and Robert Browning, the persona unwittingly reveals secret deeds they have committed, or hidden aspects of their personality.
Elegy
A lyric poem that mourns the dead: either the death of a specific figure (such as a friend of the poet or a statesman), or a more general meditation on death and transience, as in Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Certain earlier English poems (such as those by John Donne) are entitled 'elegies' although they do not fit the above description; often, they instead draw on the significantly different and broader meaning attached to the term 'elegy' in Classical prosody. These poems have not been included.
Epic poem
A long narrative poem, written in a grand style, that recounts the actions of legendary, mythical or divine figures. The narrative is usually one that is central to the traditions and beliefs of its culture. This does not include the Modernist Long Poem, which often draws on epic conventions.
Epigram
A short, light-hearted witty poem, that makes a point (often a satirical one) in a compressed, pithy manner.
Epitaph
A poem written in the form of an inscription on a gravestone. Epitaphs are generally shorter than elegies, and sum up the salient facts about a character's characteristics or achievements; they may also be witty and satirical rather than mournful, and often use the convention of addressing a passer-by.
Epithalamium
A song or poem in celebration of a wedding (originally, to be sung outside the bridal chamber on the wedding night). This is a Classical form, also known as epithalamion or prothalamion, that was revived during the Renaissance.
Eulogy
A poem in praise of a specified person, either living or dead, in the style of a commemorative speech at a funeral or memorial service.
Haiku
A single-stanza poem in strict syllabic form, consisting of seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. The form is Japanese in origin, and traditionally depicts a natural scene in a particular season; it has been adopted by English poets since the early twentieth century.
Heroic couplets
Poems written throughout in rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter. This form has been in use in English since the early sixteenth century.
Hymn
A Christian song in praise of God, to be sung in Church. We have not included settings of psalms, nor translations and adaptations of Classical hymns in this category, nor other poems in an elevated style that are entitled 'hymn' (such as Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' or Swinburne's 'Hymn to Proserpine'). (Note: the editorial policy for English Poetry explicitly excluded hymns published after 1800; Literature Online is therefore unlikely to include hymns published after that date, unless they were composed by poets selected for inclusion in our literature collections.)
Limerick
A self-contained comic poem that generally creates its effect by providing comic rhymes for the names of people and places. The verse form consists of five lines with the rhyme scheme aabba; the b-rhyme lines are shorter than the others (two stresses rather than three), and are sometimes combined into one line, making for a four-line stanza. Classically, the limerick is a single-stanza form, although poems consisting of multiple limericks (such as Wendy Cope's 'Waste Land Limericks') have also been included.
Lullaby
Traditionally, a song to be sung to children to lull them to sleep, which includes repeated refrains and employs simple language; we have also included modern poems that draw on the conventions of the lullaby.
Metaphysical poem
A poem written by one of the 'Metaphysical poets' of seventeenth-century England, in which, in the words of Samuel Johnson, 'The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions'. In other words, the poems are characterised by irony, wit and complexity, and use convoluted or far-fetched images, often drawn from the spheres of science, religion or other areas of learning. We have generally restricted the contents of this category to poems included in influential modern anthologies of metaphysical poetry.
Metrical psalm
A translation or adaptation of one or more psalms in poetic form.
Mock heroic poem
A poem in which there is an ironic disjunction between the grand and solemn style and the trivial or comic subject matter. Mock heroic poems employ epic conventions, often in order to satirise modern characters or events that are of a decidedly un-heroic nature. The mock heroic is a Classical form that flourished in England in the Neoclassical Period.
Modernist long poem
Early- or mid-twentieth-century poems that aim to provide a modern equivalent of the epic; whereas the traditional epic consists of a continuous narrative of central cultural importance, modernist long poems are fragmentary and discontinuous, and tend to combine depictions of modern culture and society with allusions to history and myth and a focus on personal psychology.
Nonsense poem
Light, humorous verse, usually written for children, that employs made-up words and/or impossible, bizarre or illogical situations and ideas.
Ode
A lyric poem of a serious and elevated tone, which flourished in English between the seventeenth century and the Romantic period. English odes were originally derived from two Classical models: the Greek Pindaric Ode (poems in irregular stanzas written in praise of public figures, and intended for public performance by a chorus) and the Latin Horatian Ode (after Horace's more private, meditative poems in regular stanzas, characterised by a tranquil mood and urbane tone). Odes are generally divided into stanzas (either regular or irregular); in content, they tend to be either meditations on public events, petitions or prayers addressed to deities or abstractions, or (in the Romantic period), expressions of a crisis in the poet's life or poetic career.
Ottava rima
An verse stanza of Italian origin, consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter with an abababcc rhyme scheme; it was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the sixteenth century, and was later used for both narrative and lyric poems, largely by Romantic poets, but also in the twentieth century.
Pastoral poem
Poems that draw on the Classical pastoral tradition in which the lives of shepherds and shepherdesses (or other scenes of country life) are depicted as a stylised Golden Age of innocence, leisure and simplicity. The sub-genres of 'idyll' and 'eclogue' are very similar in meaning to 'pastoral', and such poems have also been included in this category.
Riddle
A poem written in the form of a puzzle which challenges the reader to discover the thing, person or idea to which the poem is indirectly alluding.
Rhyme royal
A stanza form consisting of seven iambic pentameter lines rhyming ababbcc, initiated by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and other works, and subsequently used throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Examples after this period are rare.
Rondeau/Rondel/Roundel
Three closely related verse forms, all derived from Medieval French forms and subsequently revived by late-nineteenth-century English poets; all three terms refer to short song-like poems with refrains. The three terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and in all cases there are a number of variations on the basic pattern. A rondeau usually consists of 13 lines of eight syllables each, grouped in stanzas of five, three and five lines, plus a refrain, which is part of the first line and re-appears after the second and third stanzas; only two rhymes are used throughout. There are variations in length of line and number of lines, but the refrain and use of two rhymes are constant (an example is Thomas Hardy's 'The Roman Road'). The rondel also usually has 13 lines grouped in three stanzas, but the refrain comes in lines 1-2 and 7-8 (e.g. Austin Dobson, 'The Wanderer'). 'Roundel' is a Medieval synonym for 'rondeau', but was used by Swinburne in his Century of Roundels for his own variant, which has only nine lines (plus refrains) grouped in three stanzas.
Satire
A poem of the Neoclassical Period (1660-1785) that criticises and ridicules the follies and moral failings of individuals or social groups, employing rhetorical devices such as irony, hyperbole and understatement as well as more direct forms of invective and insult.
Sestina
A fixed poetic form of Medieval French origin, consisting of six six-line stanzas, in which the same end-words are repeated in a different order each time, followed by a three-line 'envoi', which employs all six of these words, three of them as end-words. The established pattern of repetition is: 1-ABCDEF, 2-FAEBDC, 3-CFDABE, 4-ECBFAD, 5-DEACFB, 6-BDFECA.
Shape/pattern poem
A poem in which the type is arranged in a regular pattern, or in a shape that represents the subject of the poem (e.g. George Herbert's Easter Wings).
Sonnet
A lyric poem consisting of 14 lines of iambic pentameter. The Petrarchan sonnet takes the form of an 'octave' (rhymed abbaabba) followed by a sestet (rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd), whereas the Shakespearian sonnet has three quatrains and a final couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There are many variations and combinations of these two patterns, including the Spenserian sonnet (ababbabc cdcdee); in addition, we have also included George Meredith's 16-line sonnets and Gerald Manley Hopkins's shorter 'curtal' sonnets as variant forms.
Spenserian stanza
A verse form consisting of stanzas of nine lines (eight iambic pentameters followed by one alexandrine) with an ababbcbcc rhyme scheme. It was developed by Edmund Spenser and adopted by many poets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Terza rima
Poems composed entirely in the verse form used by Dante Alighieri for the Divine Comedy, which consists of three-line stanzas with an interlinking rhyme-scheme: aba bcb cdc ded efe and so on.
Topographical poem
A poem that describes a specified place, either rural or urban; the tradition within English poetry begins with John Denham's Cooper's Hill (1642). The description of scenery (which is often a survey of a landscape as seen from a high vantage point) is generally a starting-point for reflections on moral, historical or political themes, or, in the work of Romantic poets, for meditations inspired by personal memory and experience.
Triolet
A short poem based on a Medieval French fixed form that was revived by late-nineteenth-century English poets. It consists of eight lines that use only two rhymes; the first two lines are repeated at the end, and the first line is also repeated as the fourth line.
Verse epistle
Any poem written in the form of a letter. These may draw on Classical models such as the Horatian epistle (a poem addressed to a friend or patron, written in a familiar, conversational mode, dealing with a moral or literary subject) or the Ovidian epistle (in which the poet adopts the persona of a fictional or legendary heroine addressing her husband or lover), but we have also included other modern poems that take the form of a letter without conforming to either of these generic conventions.
Villanelle
A fixed verse form that originated in sixteenth-century France, and was revived by English poets in the late nineteenth century. It employs only two rhymes, and consists of an odd number of three-line stanzas that rhyme aba, followed by a quatrain rhyming abaa. The first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately as the final lines of the subsequent three-line stanzas; these two lines then come together as the closing couplet of the final quatrain.
In addition to formal genres, we have also used more neutrally descriptive categories such as 'Dramatisation of novel' and 'Civil War'.