21 English Literature
88 Open Essays
Sarah Wangler & Tina Ulrich
Licence: 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.
Formats: Google Docs
American Literature I: An Anthology of Texts From Early America Through the Civil War
Edited by Jenifer Kurtz (Virginia Western Community College)
2020
Licence: CC BY-SA
This book offers an anthology of texts that includes letters, journals, poetry, newspaper articles, pamphlets, sermons, narratives, and short fiction written in and about America beginning with collected oral stories from Native American tribes and ending with the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Many major and minor authors are included, providing a sampling of the different styles, topics, cultures, and concerns present during the formation and development of America through the mid-nineteenth century.
Formats: Online, EPUB, PDF, and MOBI
Suggested for: ENGL 344
Artistic Responses to the Zong Massacre (1781)
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (PennState-University Park) and Robin Mary Bower (Penn State Beaver)
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Suitable for introductory or humanities survey courses, this module offers teaching resources for a unit on the 1781 Zong massacre. It focuses on artistic responses to the massacre and on how the massacre is a representative event of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The module includes artworks and texts that could be used in the classroom, discussion questions and activities, and a culminating writing prompt. This module invites students to reflect on the gaps in the colonial archive and to think about the role of art and literature in shaping understandings of historical events. It also provides students with an opportunity to recognize how the dehumanizing logic of slavery shaped modernity and how black artists challenge its legacy through their work.
Formats: Word files downloadable as a .zip file (after completing the “Course Download Questionnaire”)
Becoming America: An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution
Wendy Kurant (University of North Georgia)
2018
Licence: 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. Features: Contextualizing introductions from Pre- and Early Colonial Literature to Early American Romanticism; Over 70 historical images; In-depth biographies of each author; Instructional Design, including Reading and Review Questions
Format: PDF
Suggested for: ENGL 345
British Literature I: From the Middle Ages to Neoclassicism and the Eighteenth Century
Edited by Bonnie J. Robinson and Laura J. Getty (University