Open Educational Resources and Zero Textbook Cost

An anthology covering American literature from Native American texts through Mark Twain.

Featuring sixty-nine authors and full texts of their works, the selections in this open anthology represent the diverse voices in early American literature. This completely-open anthology will connect students to the conversation of literature that is embedded in American history and has helped shaped its culture.

This book offers an anthology of texts that includes letters, journals, poetry, newspaper articles, pamphlets, sermons, narratives, and short fiction written in and about America beginning with collected oral stories from Native American tribes and ending with the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature. (For works under copyright, links are provided)

A massive anthology of British literature covering the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Includes reading and review questions

A guide for students of early British Literature from the 8th to 18th centuries.
Scope: Provides an introduction, contextual materials, and discussion questions along with major texts.

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. (For works still in copyright, links are included to where they are available online.)

English Literature: Victorians and Moderns is an anthology with a difference. In addition to providing annotated teaching editions of many of the most frequently-taught classics of Victorian and Modern poetry, fiction and drama, it also provides a series of guided research casebooks which make available numerous published essays from open access books and journals, as well as several reprinted critical essays from established learned journals.

This edition of Romeo and Juliet was edited by students for students. We believe that reliably edited versions of the play should be available for free online. Our goal: to make a friendly, confidence-building edition that supported classroom activities at the high school and college level. (Oregon State University)

Introductory textbook of reading literature, suitable for early undergraduates. Includes both readings and an introduction to literary concepts.

Introduction to the study of literature, especially for non-majors.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions and educational settings. Genre in a Changing World provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, North and South America, were selected from more than 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies), the largest gathering on genre to that date.

Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities, this volume presents a number of essays on the ideological role of space in literary texts. The individual articles analyse ancient and modern literary texts from the angle of the most recent theoretical conceptualisations of space.

This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme – elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory.

The anti-textbook contents could be brief since textbooks of the past have been
wordy and boring. The anti-textbook could be visual. It might break grammar,
punctuation, and spelling rules. The textbook is still a book, sure, but its aim is to be VERY DIFFERENT. It’ll include different chapters like ones about ungrading or self-assessment, how there are no rules, “white people’s language,” and optional writing process tips. The practice bits get upgraded, too, because this book includes all kinds of genres – even the ones that aren’t considered “academic” to some, like memes and tweets.

Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.

Makes public domain texts (and other materials) openly available online. I've linked here to the Language and Literature portal.

A literary foundation whose mission is to increase public access to poetry.
Thousands of poems across many time periods & places. English language. Includes both public domain poems and poems under copyright. Often, audio files.

Representative Poetry Online, version 3.0, includes 4,700 English poems by 723 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry

The online edition is designed to meet the needs of general readers, who require a full, line by line, translation; of students, who want to understand the grammar and the meter and still have time in a semester to study and appreciate other important aspects of the poem; and of scholars, who want immediate access to a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.

This collection of about 300 Middle English primary texts was assembled over more than two decades in order to provide a publicly accessible, cross-searchable sampling of Middle English from a widely diverse range of genres, times, and places. Selection was directed towards broad inclusiveness, neglecting neither major works nor minor, but has always been constrained by the need to keep the texts public, so that anyone could access them.

The John Milton Reading Room: the complete poetry and selected prose of John Milton, with introductions, research guides, and hyperlinked annotations.

Edited texts of Shakespeare's works, including essays, resources, and materials from the Folger Library Collections.

For each of thirteen plays, an annotated and illustrated text, scene summaries, character analysis, a search engine, and a page of notable quotes. For all plays you will find notes beside the text, plus constant analysis of what is happening in each scene.