The University of North Georgia Press and Affordable Learning Georgia bring you British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond.
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.
Features:
Contextualizing introductions to the Romantic era; the Victorian era; and the Twentieth Century and beyond.
Over 90 historical images.
In-depth biographies of each author.
Instructional Design features, including Reading and Review Questions.
This textbook is an Open Educational Resource. It can be reused, remixed, and reedited freely without seeking permission.

Professor Paul Eggert, University of New South Wales, gives the 17th Annual D.F. McKenzie lecture on the subject of books and gives a case study of Henry Lawson, Australian author of Where the Billy Boils. This podcast is part of the Literature, Art and Oxford series from Oxford University.

The Castle of Otranto is often referred to as the first Gothic novel. Which is fair enough, so far as it goes; Walpole’s novel did establish many key features of this genre, which has been popular with readers ever since The Castle of Otranto was first published on Christmas Eve, 1764. Like the Gothic novels, plays, stories, and films that followed it, The Castle of Otranto teases us by suggesting that the rules of the everyday world do not always apply, that sometimes only a supernatural explanation can account for everything we see. That idea—which runs against the grain of the assumption that the modern novel is all about realism—runs through books like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and thousands more works of fiction, be they written as stories or novels, or filmed for cinema or television.

The course facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain. Students are also expected to read four of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, and J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain. Cervantes' work will be discussed in relation to paintings by Vel’zquez. The question of why Don Quixote is read today will be addressed throughout the course. Students are expected to know the book, the background readings and the materials covered in the lectures and class discussions.

Charlotte Temple was the most popular work of fiction in the antebellum United States, and, even after it was supplanted by books like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Charlotte Temple continued to be widely read in America throughout the nineteenth century. Remarkably, many contemporary readers believed this to be a true story, rather than a novel. Or, perhaps better, they enjoyed thinking that Rowson’s story might true, or contained within it the essence of some kind of moral truth, even if at some level they recognized that it was unlikely to be a documentary record of actual events. So strong was this desire to believe in the truth of Charlotte’s sad tale that at some point in the middle of the nineteenth century, a grave stone bearing the name “Charlotte Temple” was laid in the graveyard of New York City’s Trinity Church. It became a tourist destination and a kind of pilgrimage site for the novel’s many fans. In 1903, a man wrote in to the New York Post with his childhood memory of the site: “When I was a boy the story of Charlotte Temple was familiar in the household of every New Yorker. The first tears I ever saw in the eyes of a grown person were shed for her. In that churchyard are graves of heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, whose names are familiar to the youngest scholar, and whose memory is dear to the wisest and best. Their graves, tho marked by imposing monuments, win but a glance of curiosity, while the turf over Charlotte Temple is kept fresh by falling tears.”

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Comedy of Errors" 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 introductions in this anthology are meant to be just that: a basic overview of what students need to know before they begin reading, with topics that students can research further. An open access literature textbook cannot be a history book at the same time, but history is the great companion of literature: The more history students know, the easier it is for them to interpret literature.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Coriolanus" 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 Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Cymbeline" 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.

Professor Peter McDonald draws on the work of Indian novelist and literary critic, Amit Chaudhuri, to open up new ways of how we can think about D.H. Lawrence, not only as a Modernist, but also as a Post/Colonial writer. Peter then turns to Lawrence's short story, 'The Woman Who Rode Away' (1924), set in rural Mexico, in order to demonstrate how his literature runs against the grain of distinctly Western modes of thought. This audio recording is part the Interviews on Great Writers series presented by Oxford University Podcasts.

Lecture Series looking at D.H. Lawrence, author of Women in Love, Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover. These lectures focus on specific aspects of Lawrence's writing; from his use of humour to his views on Christianity.

The course is an introduction to Dante and his cultural milieu through a critical reading of the Divine Comedy and selected minor works (Vita nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande). An analysis of Dante's autobiography, the Vita nuova, establishes the poetic and political circumstances of the Comedy's composition. Readings of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise seek to situate Dante's work within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, with special attention paid to political, philosophical and theological concerns. Topics in the Divine Comedy explored over the course of the semester include the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; love and knowledge; and exile and history.

Dr Sally Bayley presents an illuminating reading of Emily Dickinson's 'I started early, took my dog'. In her reading, she seeks out allusions to Shakespearean plays including Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. She then answers questions about the poem. This audio recording is part the Interviews on Great Writers series presented by Oxford University Podcasts.

In one of literature's most haunting denunciations of censorship, Ray Bradbury uses the materials of science fiction to tell the story of Guy Montag, a fireman forced to burn books. 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.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is one of those books that we all know even if we have never read it. With his first work of fiction, Daniel Defoe–a businessman turned poet, journalist, and political propagandist–created a character who very quickly went on to have a life that went well beyond the pages of the book that first appeared, without build-up, fanfare, or even the author’s name on the title page, in April 1719. Robinson Crusoe was an immediate bestseller; the bookseller went through several editions in the first year alone. By August, Defoe had produced a sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a work that he wrote quickly in part to head off the possibility that someone else might beat him to it. Over the last three hundred years, the story of a person isolated on a deserted island or something like it, has been used by dozens, maybe hundreds of writers, who have made it a genre of its own, the “Robinsoniad,” a genre that includes satirical parodies like Gulliver’s Travels, children’s books like The Swiss Family Robinson, Bugs Bunny cartoons, television situation comedies like Gilligan’s Island, and science fiction works like The Martian. Robinson Crusoe, the man and the book in which he first appeared, has become one of the foundational myths of the modern world.The story of one man’s survival has become so well known in all of these instances that it can be difficult to see through the mythology to analyze Defoe’s original book and to imagine what its first readers might have noticed and found so striking. It is important to recognize, for example, that the book is told in the first person, by a narrator who never lets on that this is a work of fiction. Defoe’s name, as noted above, did not appear on the title page of the first edition (although it quickly became clear to those in the know that he was the author), or even in any of the many editions issued in his lifetime. Although the book is famous for the many years that Crusoe spends on the island, it takes a while for him to get there, and his experiences both before and after his time there are worth paying attention to for the way that they frame the central experience. Defoe’s prose is sometimes clunky-he has a tendency to shape sentences and paragraphs that would never pass muster with a modern copyeditor–but it is also capable of great beauty and insight, and rewards careful attention.

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.