cynthiasite

Websites to Help You Learn about Literature

Here's my annotated list of websites to which I often refer students for help with their study & understanding of literature.

• Lit Links > Bedford/St. Martin's provides an excellent and extensive list of websites--with notes about what kinds of information about a work, its author, or period on each site--organized alphabetically by author within five genres: fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and critical theory.
• The Voice of the Shuttle > University of California/Santa Barbara offers this outstanding site with links to numerous Humanities sites listed by academic field & area of study. Also check out the Literature Webliography.
• E-Server > Formerly The English Server, this online community publishes written works in literature (fiction, drama, and poetry) as well as many other subjects including art, film, feminism, government, history, languages, music, and philosophy. For other full-text literature sites, try Project Gutenberg and Bartleby.com.
• Internet Public Library LitCrit > The IPL Literary Criticism Collection contains critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by nationality and literary period.
• Wired for Books > Ohio University's WOUB presents a collection of interviews and readings by a variety of authors, as well as a link to Don Swaim's full interviews with many of the best writers of the English language  (the full 30-45 minutes, not the truncated 2-minute interviews that were featured on BookBeat).
• Poets.org > This is the popular, award-winning website of the Academy of American Poets, where you can find hundreds of essays and interviews about poetry, biographies of more than 500 poets, almost 2000 poems, and audio clips of 150 poems read by their authors or other poets. I'm also a big fan of Poetry 180, set up at the Library of Congress by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins (its focus is on making poetry accessible to high school students, but the poems are great for poetry novices in college and beyond!).
• Norton Anthology of American Literature (NAAL) > Especially for students in my American Lit II class, NAAL offers period introductions, timelines, biographies, author explorations, reviews & quizzes, and more.
• Perspectives in American Literate (PAL) > An extensive research and reference tool maintained by Paul Reubens of Cal State, this site has over 500 pages, including over 420 author pages with photos, brief bios, bibliographies, and related links.
• Cambridge History of English & American Literature > From the Bartleby collection, go directly to Vol. 15: Early National Literature Part I for resources on Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Smith, Bradford, and Winthrop; Puritans; Jonathan Edwards; Benjamin Franklin; American political writing; early lyric poetry; Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper; and Ralph Waldo Emerson and transcendentalism.

  Or go directly to Vol. 16: Early National Literature Part II & Later National Literature Part I for resources on Henry David Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Longfellow and Whittier; Edgar Allan Poe; political oratory; Walt Whitman; Civil War poets; and dialect writers such as Joel Chandler Harris.

• MobyLives > Completely free and truly independent news and commentary about books and writers.