These include critiques and analysis not from the lifespan or shortly thereafter of a writer, or more broadly, the time period of a literary movement. Journal articles and books that provide overviews fall into this category. Analyses of a particular work or an author's ouevre over time- theoretical treatments using a cultural or political framework, such as New Historicism, feminism, colonialism, ecocriticism, or postmodernism, offering the author's interpretation, are secondary sources. In Super Search, you can narrow down your results by subject, or use the Advanced Search to search your author as a subject.
You can combine your author or work with specific theoretical approaches. You'll find some have been treated more broadly than others, given an author's historical period and cultural milieu. For example, taking an ecocritical approach to Kate Chopin's The Awakening may yield very few sources, whereas combining "awakening AND Chopin AND feminism" in a database like JSTOR, Literature Resource, or MLA, will bring you multiple results written over many decades.
All databases use the same or very similar search mechanisms to both limit and expand your results.
Phrase Searching
Place several words within quotes to search those exact words in that exact order.
"masque of the red death"
"code switching"
Truncation and Wildcards
Use a symbol (usually * or ?) to search all words that start with entered letters.
fem* searches for feminism, feminine, female
eco* searches ecological, ecology, ecocritical, ecocriticism, economic, economy, economical, etc.
*hist* ​searches ahistorical, historicism, history, histories
Boolean Operators
AND searches for both terms, OR searches for either term, NOT omits a term.
"herman melville" AND slav* NOT "benito cereno"
"queer stud*" OR gender