Literature - American and English - Open Educational Resources: OER and ZTC Resources by Subject (A-Z)

ZTC / Library Databases and LibGuiides

Western Library Databases for Writing and Literature (ZTC)

Library Databases are an excellent resource for essays, short stories, and poetry. For example, MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) provides Full-Text access to many of the short stories and essays compiled in anthologies for Norton and other textbooks from magazines like Atlantic, New Yorker, Harpers' and more!

Try an author search and see what's there!

Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
A giant database that covers a wide range of topics. Use it to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles, as well as articles from trade journals, newspapers, and magazines.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Use this database to understand basic concepts taught in your courses. It's also a great database for the first step in your research process. It contains short articles from encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks and other reference sources on a wide range of subjects. Get started on your assignment or research project by learning about key people, places, dates, events, concepts, and ideas related to your topic.
Literary Reference Plus (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Use this database for literature assignments and projects. Information is provided on thousands of authors and their works. Types of sources include literary magazines and journals, literary reviews and criticism, plot summaries and synopses, critical essays, reference books, author biographies, full-text classic novels, book reviews, short stories and poems.
Literature: LitFinder (Gale) This link opens in a new window
A great source to access historical and contemporary literary works and authors, including full-text poems, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. The database also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and multimedia. Includes Gale’s visual Topic Finder tool.
Literature Resource Center (Gale) This link opens in a new window
Find biographies, overviews, and reference information, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on nearly 150,000 authors in all fields of literature, from all time periods throughout history and around the world. Content from scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and multimedia. Includes Gale’s visual Topic Finder tool.
MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Find content from full-text general-interest magazines and newspapers, with content that includes essays, short stories, and poetry. Also find journal articles and reference books, in a wide range of subjects including business, health, fashion, sports, personal finance, and more.
Poetry & Short Story Reference Source (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Full-text classic and contemporary poems, short stories, biographies, essays, lesson plans and learning guides

LibGuide Page: Introduction to Writing
A list of OER/ZTC materials that can be used for English courses that introduce the concepts involved in writing - critical thinking, rhetoric, and argument as well as to find essays, creative nonfiction, short stories, and poetry that support students with examples of a variety of writing formats.

OER Literature

An Anthology of Student Writing Collected at Lansing Community College
Student writing collected from English classes at Lansing Community College with brief notes from instructors. Intended audience--faculty and students. A brief annotated bibliography about publishing student writing and permission form in Appendices
Composition Reading Bank
A repository of links to freely available texts that replaces a traditional reader for Composition courses. Texts are organized by thematic tabs, and within each tab, texts are alphabetized by the authors’ last names. Accompanying each listed text are two things: 1) a brief summary; 2) a small, lower-case "i" that, when clicked/tapped, provides a brief example of how the text might be used in a Composition course.
Creating Literary Analysis
Writing about Literature through Theory is designed to appeal to multiple audiences: the text can be used in introductory classes on literature, in composition classes that focus on literature, and in literature classes designed for English majors. What connects these multiple audiences is the book’s focus on literary theory, certainly, but also on its introduction to academic argument and its emphasis on the writing process
My Slipper Floated Away
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. They grew up hearing gunshots and sirens at night, played fire escape basketball and still celebrate Thanksgiving by dancing. The stories reveal the writers' intense longing to belong in America and their passion to succeed in this country, while dealing with myriad challenges. They bear witness, in riveting, artful narratives that will be revelatory to Americans who fear and resent immigrants or people of color.
Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations
This book approaches the act of writing poetry from a practitioner’s perspective and as an act of play. The text provides strategies and detailed practices that nurture and maintain creative states necessary for all stages of writing.
Off the Shelf: A Digital Anthology of Classic and Contemporary Short Stories
Represents a diverse selection of authors from the 19th century to today. Also includes support materials. From OER Commons.
Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature
This textbook takes a distinctly socio-historical approach to introducing Early American literature from origin myths to early 20th century texts.
Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative
A college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory to help students develop their competence in analyzing and interpreting short stories and novels, as well as writing them. Clarity is prioritized over the intricacy of theory to further the study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narrative theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterization, and narration, as well as on language and theme. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for students who are unfamiliar with rhetoric; the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism).
American Literature I: An Anthology of Texts From Early America Through the Civil War
The authors and texts here are representative of the many writers who were writing throughout the colonization and development of what we now consider the United States of America. The text begins with a selection of Native American stories, which passed down orally for many years before they were committed to paper around the turn of the 20th century. to give a context to the portrayal of the Native Americans that is provided in the early texts written by explorers and colonists, as well as to acknowledge the vast array of cultures and stories that were present in this continent when the first explorers arrived. From there, the text is organized chronologically. At first, most of the texts are non-fiction. Documenting the experiences of traveling to and settling in a new world. Some of these authors will be familiar to you, as they also figure prominently in early American history. Several historical documents are included within this collection, often excerpted from the larger complete document. This text represents a variety of genre, from letters, personal narratives, and speeches to poetry, sketches, and fiction.

OER - University of North Georgia

Compact Anthology of World Literature

In a world literature class, there is no way that a student can be equally familiar with all of the societies, contexts, time periods, cultures, religions, and languages that they will encounter; even though the works presented here are translated, students will face issues such as unfamiliar names and parts of the story (such as puns) that may not translate well or at all. Since these stories are rooted in their cultures and time periods, it is necessary to know the basic context of each work to understand the expectations of the original audience.
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.

Part 1: Compact Anthology of World Literature - The Ancient World
Literature from the Middle East, Near East, Greence, Rome, China, and India. (PDF)
Part 2: Compact Anthology of World Literature - Middle Ages
Literature of Europe, Middle East, China, Japan, South Asia. (PDF)
Part 3: Compact Anthology of World Literature - The Renaissance
Literature of Korea, Europe, Native America. (PDF)
Part 4: Compact Anthology of World Literature - 17th and 18th Centuries
Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Age of Reason, The Near East, and Asia (Manifold Platform - direct link.)
Part 5: Compact Anthology of World Literature - The Long 19th Century
Literature of the Nineteenth Century - Romanticism and Realism. (Manifold Platform - direct link)
Part 6: Compact Anthology of World Literature - 20th Century and Contemporary Literature
Literature of the 20th century and beyond - Modernism, Post-Colonial Literature, and Contemporary Literature. (Manifold Platform - direct link)
Great Works of African American Literature
Literature from the periods of captivity, enslavement, and resistance; slave voyages, reconstruction, New Negro Renaissance; Harlem Renaissance; Urban Realism; Black Arts Movement; and the Late 20th Century-Present.

Websites

The Marginalian
Authored by Maria Popova — a reader and a wonderer reckoning with the meaning of it all in writing. The Marginalian is the record of the reckoning — a one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a tender, thoughtful life of purpose and gladness, wonder-smitten by reality. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a chronicle of my ongoing becoming — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling; a private inquiry shimmering with the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: