Anthologies

88 Open Essays (CC BY-SA)

These essays were collected from online magazines that offer their articles under Creative Commons licenses.  A few are from individual authors who generously agreed to give their work an open license in order to share it for this collection.

My Slipper Floated Away: New American Memoirs (CC BY-NC-ND)

An anthology of fresh, compelling essays written by students at Lehman College in the Bronx. The writers are immigrants or the children of immigrants and/or POC.

Collections

Digitized Shakespeare (CC BY)

A library’s rich holdings of early English drama include the majority of editions of William Shakespeare published before 1660.

English and Writing Collection Resources (Various CC licenses)

A composite of 22 English and Writing Collections Resources (each with their own CC license) available through OER Commons.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (CC0)

A collection of over 25,000 XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early print books produced by The Text Creation Partnership. They transcribe and mark up the text from the millions of page images in ProQuest’s Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints.

 Making Nineteenth-Century Literary Environments (CC BY-NC-ND)

A collection of student papers from the Simon Fraser University course English 435: Topics in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century. All papers have been peer reviewed by the students, received instructor feedback, and revised for publication.

Project Gutenberg (Public domian)

A collection of public domain literature available in multiple formats.

Thomas Raddall’s Short Stories (CC BY-NC-SA)

This digital edition contains five short stories by Thomas Raddall from unpublished and undated typescripts held in the Dalhousie University Archives.

The Victorian Web (Various CC licences)

A collection of primary and secondary materials (books, articles, images) in British Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts. Although the site concentrates on Great Britain in the age of Victoria (1837–1901), it includes much material before and after those years, particularly in sculpture and architecture, and the site also has a good deal of comparative material.

Monographs

 From Family to Philosophy: Letter-Writers from the Pastons to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

A cultural change in the Renaissance freed talented European writers to compose letters rivalling the finest that survived from ancient Rome. This book traces the lives and outlooks of distinguished Britons as revealed in their correspondence. The subjects range from the fierce satirist Jonathan Swift to the long-lived, all-observing Horace Walpole and from the poet and freedom fighter Lord Byron to the tormented but brilliant Jane Carlyle. Accompanying the self-portraits these writers unwittingly create are their many sketches of their contemporaries. Moreover, the views they express on forms of government, feminism, literature, theology, religious toleration, and other topics serve to relate their lives to the progression from the Age of Reason through the Romantic period to the Victorian era. Published by ePublishing Service, UVic Libraries.

The Malahat Review: Canada’s Iconic Literary Journal (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; excluding Christy Clark and the Kinder Morgan Go-Go Girls by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun)

This publication commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Malahat Review. Edited by John Barton, editor of The Malahat Review from 2004-2018, the publication features essays, critical commentaries, and memoirs from past and present editors, contributors, and editorial board members, as well as nationally prominent writers with long associations with the magazine. It outlines the magazine’s fifty-year history, its role in the lives of Canadian writers, and its international legacy. Published by University of Victoria Libraries.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives (CC BY)

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world — mechanistic materialism and vitalism — in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot.

Supplemental Materials

Moon of the Crusted Snow: Reading Guide (CC BY-NC-SA)

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice is a fictional novel that looks at how an Anishinaabe First Nation, in northern Ontario, deals with an unknown event that leaves the community isolated, without power or phone service, and limited food sources as winter sets in. This guide, developed collaboratively with the author, discusses themes and connections, quotes, resources, discussion questions, activities, and additional readings.

WISC-Online Literature Learning Objects (CC BY-NC)

A collection of learning objects on various topics in literature comprehension.

Textbooks

Becoming America: An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution (CC BY-SA)

Featuring sixty-nine authors and full texts of their works, the selections in this open anthology represent the diverse voices in early American literature. This completely-open anthology will connect students to the conversation of literature that is embedded in American history and has helped shaped its culture.

British Literature: Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century and Neoclassicsm (CC BY-SA)

Featuring over 50 authors and full texts of their works, this anthology follows the shift of monarchic to parliamentarian rule in Britain, and the heroic epic to the more egalitarian novel as genre.

British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond (CC BY-SA)

Featuring 37 authors and full texts of their works, the selections in this open anthology represent the literature developed within and developing through their respective eras. This completely-open anthology will connect students to the conversation of literature that has captivated readers in the past and still holds us now.

Compact Anthology of World Literature (CC BY-SA)

The emphasis in this anthology is on non-Western and European works, with only the British authors who were the most influential to European and non-Western authors (such as Shakespeare, whose works have influenced authors around the world to the present day).

Compact Anthology of World Literature II (CC BY-SA)

This book is a continuation of Compact Anthology of World Literature. This literature anthology contains three sections: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which includes information on the Age of Reason and the Near East and Asia; the long nineteenth century, which covers romanticism and realism; and the twentieth century and contemporary literature, which talks about modernism and postcolonial literature. Instructor resources are available for this book by request to the publisher.

Consequential Contexts (CC BY-NC)

Principles for Effective Community Engagement in Technical and Professional Writing.

Contribute a Verse: An Introduction to First Year Composition (CC BY-SA)

This text combines a composition rhetoric manual with grammar and documentation instruction and resources, components that can be flexibly arranged to fit instructors’ classroom plans. Its contents include Reading Critically/Engaging the Material; Rhetorical Situations; Effective Argument; Introductions and Conclusions; Logic of Assertion, Evidence, and Interpretation; Documentation; Visual Rhetoric; Multi-Modality; Inter-disciplinary Writing; and Grammar.

EmpoWord: A Student-Centered Anthology & Handbook for College Writers (CC BY-NC)

This is a reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class.

Entering the Conversation: A College Composition Compilation (CC BY)

A collection of readings that emerged out of partnerships between OER enthusiasts, composition instructors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and contributors who shared ideas and resources on a Twitter thread about open composition.

English Literature: Victorians and Moderns (CC BY 4.0)

English Literature: Victorians and Moderns is an anthology with a difference. In addition to providing annotated teaching editions of many of the most frequently-taught classics of Victorian and Modern poetry, fiction and drama, it also provides a series of guided research casebooks which make available numerous published essays from open access books and journals, as well as several reprinted critical essays from established learned journals such as English Studies in Canada and the Aldous Huxley Annual with the permission of the authors and editors.

Designed to supplement the annotated complete texts of three famous short novels: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, each casebook offers cross-disciplinary guided research topics which will encourage majors in fields other than English to undertake topics in diverse areas, including History, Economics, Anthropology, Political Science, Biology, and Psychology. Selections have also been included to encourage topical, thematic, and generic cross-referencing. Students will also be exposed to a wide-range of approaches, including new-critical, psychoanalytic, historical, and feminist.

 Fronts of Modernity: The 20th-Century Collections at the University of Victoria Libraries (CC BY-NC-ND)

This book outlines 20th-century collections held at the University of Victoria. For more information, read the book review. Published by University of Victoria.

Kids Read the Best Stuff (CC BY-NC-SA)

This textbook from North Dakota State College covers the study of children’s literature.

Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Informed by a writing philosophy that values both spontaneity and discipline, Michelle Bonczek Evory’s Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations offers practical advice and strategies for developing a writing process that is centered on play and supported by an understanding of America’s rich literary traditions.

With consideration to the psychology of invention, Bonczek Evory provides students with exercises aimed to make writing in its early stages a form of play that gives way to more enriching insights through revision, embracing the writing of poetry as both a love of language and a tool that enables us to explore ourselves and better understand the world. The volume includes resources for students seeking to publish and build a writing-centered lifestyle or career. Poets featured range in age, subject, and style, and many are connected to colleges in the State University of New York system.

Naming the Unnameable promotes an understanding of poetry as a living art of which students are a part, and provides ways for students to involve themselves in the growing contemporary poetry community that thrives in America today.

Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature (CC BY)

This textbook takes a distinctly socio-historical approach to introducing Early American literature. The anthology will allow students to engage with literature in exciting and dynamic ways.

The Woman in White: Grangerized Edition (CC BY)

This text is the beta version of a participatory critical edition of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. By “beta version,” we mean “text in progress.”

World Literature I: Beginnings to 1650 (CC BY-SA)

A three-part textbook taking a comparative approach to world literature from the beginning.

A Writer’s Guide to Mindful Reading (CC BY-NC-ND)

This book develops and enacts the mindful reading pedagogy described in Ellen C. Carillo’s scholarly monograph Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (Utah State UP). Offering a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction by focusing on reading and writing, A Writer’s Guide to Mindful Reading supports students as they become more reflective, deliberate, and mindful readers and writers by working within a metacognitive framework.

Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking, and Communication (CC BY-SA)

Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition.

Writing the Nation: Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present (CC BY-SA)

An anthology of American literature since 1865.

Year of Ulysses (CC BY)

The YoU book is a record of the multiple events the Modernist Versions Project ran over the course of a year as it published in digital facsimile the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It includes a curated record of all the Twitter chats hosted by Joyce scholars over the course of the year, and focusing on each chapter as it was released. It thus captures the apparently ephemeral activity of scholars conversing in real time over social media about Ulysses.

Websites

Walt Whitman Archive (CC BY-NC-SA)

A collection of works by and about Walt Whitman.