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Open Access & Open Educational Resources for English and American Literature

English Literature Open Access Resources

Chaucer MetaPage
Contains links to Chaucer resources on the web collected by scholars.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literary Dialogues
Contains resources for students, scholars, and teachers of postcolonial and multicultural approaches to British and world literature.

Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians
A site from Oxford University where you can explore literary treasures of the Romantic and Victorian periods.

Early English Books Online (EEBO)
EEBO includes facsimile pages of important works by literary giants like Chaucer and Bacon, but also contains many rare and little-known materials that were previously only available to those with access to special collections at academic libraries. Previously, the texts were only available to users at academic libraries involved in the partnership but the data was released into the public domain on 1 January, 2015.

English Literature Links
A very comprehensive site with links to English literature glossary, essays, reference sites, historical time periods and genres, authors,books on film, short story writing, literary theory, literature web directories, ebooks, and more.

Great Writers Inspire
Includes audio and video lectures, short talks, ebooks and etexts that are downloadable and in the public domain or licensed for free educational use. The site was developed by the faculty of English Language and Literature at Oxford University.

Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website
An excellent site from Harvard University dedicated to the study of Chaucer.

Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature
A comprehensive anthology and guide to English literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Restoration and Eighteenth Century.

Online Resources: The British Library
Contains unique collection items and resources related to English, history and citizenship. The English collection consists of twentieth century literature, Shakespeare and Renaissance writers, Romantics and Victorians, access to audio recordings of poetry and interpretation of poems, evolution of the English language decade by decade, and a disparate collection of over 400 texts including the English dictionary, cookbooks, shopping lists and song lyrics. 

Open Source Shakespeare
Open Source Shakespeare contains the complete works of Shakespeare, statistical analysis of the plays, and a concordance. The site is searchable. 

OpenLearn
OpenLearn contains free courses on various subjects. You can browse subject categories to explore topics and find reference materials.

Oscar Wilde Online
A website containing the plays, prose works, poetry, short stories, essays, lectures, and reviews of Oscar Wilde, an Irish born writer and one of the most successful playwrights of the Victorian era.

Oxford University Podcasts
Oxford University provides lectures delivered by professors under a Creative Commons license free for reuse, remixing and redistribution in education worldwide.

Resources in Old English
Contain excellent examples of open education resources in the humanities. Can read the original version of Beowulf.

Romantic Circles
A refereed scholarly web site devoted to the study of Romantic period literature and culture.

Shakespeare: Bodleian First Folio
Contains the digital facsimile of the Bodleian first folio of Shakespeare's plays.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive
The archive provides the digital manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Goodwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Victorian Web
The Victorian Web discusses literature, history, and culture during the reign of Queen Victoria. 

William Blake Archive
A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Rochester, and the Scholarly Editions and Translations Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities.