Brazen serpents for Students of Literature (General Sources for Literary Study)

Moses erects the brazen serpent
to heal the snake-bitten Israelites

Students of literature need to have clear, familiar, and occasionally miraculous sources for help. They need brazen serpents to which to turn. Do you have yours?

Numbers 21:6-9 tells the story of the Israelites getting bitten by fiery serpents. Their cure: a serpent made of brass that Moses affixed to a pole. The bitten could simply look toward the brazen serpent and they would be healed.

I didn't know that story, nor how it could apply to literary study, until I was slogging my way through Shakespeare for the first time in my 9th grade English class at Brighton High School. The teacher, Richard McAllister, had us read Julius Caesar aloud in class. We'd come across a word, like "carrion" and give him that blank stare that only a 14-year old can give.

"Where is your brazen serpent?" he would intone, maybe even looking upward.

We had no idea what he meant. So he would sigh and open the dictionary, read to us that "carrion" meant "dead carcass" and back we'd go to Shakespeare. We'd hit another word like "betimes." Again, the blank stare from us, and again Mr. McAllister sighing and looking up woefully to ask, "Where is your brazen serpent?"

Finally, one of us got brave enough actually to get up, go to the back of the room and consult the huge dictionary from the shelf. "Betimes" meant "at once." Over time, we got better at being "betimes" in seeking the brazen serpents we needed. Going to the effort to consult a worthy source would earn the student what Mr. McAllister called "anti-philistine points." We had to look up "Philistine" to realize getting anti-philistine points was actually a good thing. But we could, now, because we knew at least one reliable brazen serpent to which to turn--the dictionary.

The dictionary is a core source for literary study, but certainly not the only "brazen serpent" to which one may turn. I'd like to introduce just a few.
But first, I want to make a distinction in the type of resource to which I am referring. What I am calling "brazen serpents" are general literary resources. They provide assistance to beginners, to those grappling with understanding the text(s) in question or needing a primary orientation to the genre of literature being discussed, or its historical and cultural context.

Not-so-brazen-serpents
What I am not referring to are focused studies of a given text found in a scholarly monograph or a journal article. Such traditional scholarship which analyzes and interprets literary texts from a given point of view is very valuable. I am not opposed to these; I am merely suggesting more primary works ought to be more primary in one's research. It is all too possible to become lost in the minutiae of a literary interpretation that may very well depend upon general knowledge that non-specialists simply lack.

For example, at some point my analysis of Moby Dick may take me fruitfully to the following article or the following book:

• Deines, Tim. Symplokē. "Re-Marking the Ultratranscendental in Moby-Dick." A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship18. 1-2 (2010): 261-279.
• Dowling, David. Chasing the white whale: The Moby-Dick marathon; or, What Melville Means Today. Oakey Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010

But for someone beginning their understanding of the text, those focused studies might be a bit overwhelming. It might be better to start with something like a source that introduced the text itself, or that discussed its genre, or that talked briefly and generally about the author or the work's time period.

Note: I have purposely almost entirely omitted websites or Google searches from the following. Online sources are not inappropriate per se, but require their own set of skills to use well for someone starting literary interpretation. I would rather address online resources separately. I do, however, bring up a number of highly useful electronic databases.

Brazen Serpent Type #1: Textual Reference Works
Textual reference works include dictionaries, concordances, indices of characters, or introductory reference works. A solid historical dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary is standard starting point for studying the origin and usage of words and expressions. I often send students to Shakespeare Searched where they can look up words and phrases across or within Shakespeare's plays. Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric is a general reference work for rhetorical terminology, much of which applies to literary analysis. Increasingly, corpora (complete sets of searchable texts) are being made available for linguistic and stylistic approaches to literary study, especially for the works of major authors (Dickens, for example). All of these sources help literary critics do close readings for language, figures of speech, style, and literary form. These are not themselves analyses of specific texts; they are the tools to aid those types of textual analyses.

Brazen Serpent Type #2: Encyclopedias and Guides
I've long been a fan of Benet's Readers' Encyclopedia because of its so brief and so informative overviews of major works, periods, and characters. Oxford publishes a number of such guides, often broken down into some of the other types of resources I list below. These are being centralized online at Oxford Reference, but are still only largely available through an institutional subscription. If one is fortunate enough to be affiliated with a library or university that has them, there are many such literary databases. Two solid ones include Chadwyck's Literature Online and Gale's LRC (Literature Resource Center). Major fictional characters are described and analyzed in sources like the Cyclopedia of Literary Characters (also available via institutional subscription through Magill On Literature Plus | via BYU). Certain major works or authors may have reference works devoted entirely to their work, such as The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. I recommend that digital-age students not rely so heavily on Wikipedia when there are these focused and authoritative literary encyclopedias available both electronically and in print. One highly valuable online resource for English literature that I will mention is Luminarium.

Brazen Serpent Type #3: Genre Reference Works
If you can talk about the genre of a work of literature, you've already got plenty of ways into discussing the text's meanings. This is one reason I recommend William Harmon and Hugh Holman's classic Handbook to Literature. Such a reference work does well with general genres, but there are also reference books that look more specifically at a genre. For example, Science Fiction after 1900 gives an overview of that popular genre. There are comparable works for other genres such as the epic, the novel, etc. (This type of work can easily overlap with type #5, covering literary histories.)

Brazen Serpent Type #4: Author Biography
The Harmon and Holman handbook cited above is more broad than just examining genre. It also looks at authors. But one can also get a general idea of an author and his or her works by consulting Contemporary Authors [via BYU] or the more broad Dictionary of Literary Biography [via BYU]. Both of these are available in both book and electronic forms. There are sometimes biographical / bibliographical resources associated with single, important authors. I'm thinking of something highly useful like Charles Boyce's Shakespeare A to Z, which provides not only biographical and historical information about Shakespeare and his day, but also provides brief summaries and analyses of the major works. There are comparable reference works for other major authors.

Brazen Serpent Type #5: Literary Histories or Periods
The various periods of literature have common characteristics, so having a sense of the literary scene across a given period or place (the themes, genres, publishing practices, literacy, geography, politics, etc.) can go a long ways toward illuminating any given text or author from within it. See, for example, the Oxford Companion to American Literature [via BYU] and comparable volumes for other periods or places. One can also say much about the context of a work by referring to a timeline, such as Timelines of the Arts and Literature.

Do you have other brazen serpents that you turn to profitably to analyze or research literature? Let me know.