Lecture series looking at key concepts in studying Literature; including lectures on the concept of unreliable narrators to theory of comparative literature. This series was filmed in the English Faculty in Trinity Term 2012

An eclectic range of comic and tragic voices narrate this powerful book about the enduring power of love. Erdrich leads the reader through the interwoven lives of generations of Kashpaws and Lamartines in North Dakota. The Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Merchant of Venice" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

ePub version of text The Merry Wiues of Windsor by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

This edition is derived from the Project Gutenberg edition of A Modest Proposal.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Much Ado About Nothing" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family plans to farm the untamed Nebraska land. Willa Cather's tale comes to us through the eyes of Antonia's childhood friend, Jim Burden. The Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, time lines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.

Novels for the End of a World is an introduction to the twenty-first century novel as written and published across the Spanish-speaking world. It's also an argument for reading narrative fiction from Spain and Latin America as a single entity. Where once we analyzed literature within narrow national traditions, today’s best-seller lists, literary prize money, and even the tales themselves point to the need for more holistic approaches. So too the themes they explore. Today’s writers and readers inhabit a global world where our sense of space and time shrinks at exponential rates. At the same time so much of daily experience continues to be lived locally and, as always, with often overwhelming affect. Given that, it shouldn´t surprise us to find common threads and themes running across narrative fiction from Madrid to Mexico, from Argentina to Asturias, and yet to find at each stop these themes registered through intensely and intimately local stories. In this way, Novels for the End of a World becomes at once an overview of major trends in narrative across the Spanish-speaking world and a trip through the rich, wide variety of local life. Arising out of this literary adventure is one thread common to all: that beyond the end is a barely distinguishable glimmer of light, a sign of new ways for a new world.

John Locke’s treatise “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” often called simply the Second Treatise of Government is probably the most influential work of political theory in the English language. Locke’s essay was widely read in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century, and his arguments about government, consent, and property rights (just to name three of its main topics) became fundamental to the way that western people have conceived of these ideas ever since. Locke (1632-1704) provided some of the intellectual underpinning for the American revolution of the 1770s and 80s; many of the writers who supported the revolt against Parliament and the British Crown, such as Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, had read Locke, and you can see his emphasis on the need for government to have the consent of the governed reflected in their works.

Bradford’s account of the early years of the Plymouth colony remained in manuscript form until the 1890s, when it was finally transcribed and printed for general publication. This edition is taken from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1898 edition.

At a New England prep school where keeping up appearances is everything, Tobias Wolff's youthful narrator learns the painful difference between truth and fiction. The Big Read Reader's Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.

This anthology is divided into five major sections, starting with the Colonial period and ending with the publication of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl on the eve of the Civil War. Each section includes an overview and framework for approaching the readings, as well as overarching questions to help students think about the connections between the texts. There is also a brief introduction to each of the authors featured in these sections, followed by discussion questions based on the texts. The textual introductions do not include a great deal of biographical material; instead, I have used them to provide a frame (typically connected to the larger section introduction) that I hope will help students to navigate from. The discussion questions could also easily be used as open-ended exam questions or as essay prompts. Some of the discussion questions are also invitations for students to make intertextual connections, or to consider how the literary landscape changes from its “beginnings” to the Civil War.

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 table of contents has been drafted, and we are currently looking for introduction authors and help securing public domain texts.