Open Education Resources

Access to some of the millions of titles digitized by libraries from around the world.

Free online learning materials, most of which have been peer- or crowd-source reviewed. Supported by the California State University System and faculty, staff, students, administrators, and librarians from around the world.

Open access resources for college and university undergraduate literature, arts, and humanities. Includes a range of resources from textbooks to courseware.

"Online journal and not-for-profit dedicated to exploring the... history of art, literature and ideas." Collections include images, books, film, and audio from online aggregators and academic libraries. Filter by epoch or theme.

Online speech bank includes the "top 100 speeches of all time," Obama speeches (campaign, first and second term), movie speeches, 9/11 speeches, and much more.

2020
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. Many major and minor authors are included, providing a sampling of the different styles, topics, cultures, and concerns present during the formation and development of America through the mid-nineteenth century.

2021
Funded by the University System of Georgia’s “Affordable Learning Georgia” initiative, An Introduction to African and Afro-Diasporic Peoples and Influences in British Literature and Culture before the Industrial Revolution corrects, expands, and celebrates the presence of the African Diaspora in the study of British Literature, undoing some of the anti-Black history of British studies.

2024
Introduction to Literature: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and How They Shape Us introduces college freshmen to the study of literature through a focus on texts that, generally, they already know, or think they know, and how those texts aim to shape audiences to be compliant cultural objects. The book is organized around several prominent story groups, including various genres and forms, meant to promote discussion and discovery leading to students’ understanding that these texts function as cultural sculptors of readers’ principles and behaviors. Students develop the skill of analyzing texts and creating sound arguments about them through class discussions and a series of writing assignments. Ideally, they leave the course understanding how to create a sound argument and, more pointedly, that there is no such thing as “just a story.”

2018
The University of North Georgia Press and Affordable Learning Georgia bring you British Literature I: From the Middle Ages to Neoclassicism and the Eighteenth Century. Featuring over 50 authors and full texts of their works, this anthology follows the shift of monarchic to parliamentarian rule in Britain, and the heroic epic to the more egalitarian novel as genre.

2022
Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain--those published or translated before 1923--are replicated here. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. In those cases, we have provided a link to a stable site that includes the text. Thus, in Part 6, most of the texts are accessible in the form of links to outside sites. In every case, we have attempted to connect to the most stable links available.

2019
Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s, Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies. Drawing on recent work on affect and emotion, the book explores how disability makes us feel, and how those feelings shape interpersonal and fictional encounters. Written in a clear and accessible style, Disability, Literature, Genre offers a timely reflection on the rapidly growing body of scholarship on disability representation, as well as an innovative new theorisation of genre. By reconceptualising genre reading as an affective process, Ria Cheyne establishes genre fiction as a key site of investigation for disability studies. She argues that genre fiction’s unique combination of affectivity and reflexivity makes it ideally suited to the production of reflexive representations of disability: representations which encourage the reader to reflect upon what they understand about disability, and potentially to rethink it. Examining the affective—and effective—power of disability representations in a wide range of popular genre fiction, this book will be essential reading for academics in disability studies, literary studies, popular culture studies, and the medical humanities.

2015
This peer-reviewed World Literature I anthology includes introductory text and images before each series of readings. Sections of the text are divided by time period in three parts: the Ancient World, Middle Ages, and Renaissance, and then divided into chapters by location.

Literature, rhetoric, and poetry open textbooks. According to the website, approximately 60 percent of the titles have been reviewed (by faculty at member institutions).

Open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by State University of New York (SUNY) faculty.

2017
We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones. Some of those bad ideas are quite old, such as the archetype of the inspired genius author, the five-paragraph essay, or the abuse of adjunct writing teachers. Others are much newer, such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas, such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting, are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline. Yet the same core questions such as what is good writing, what makes a good writer, how should writing be assessed, and the like persist across contexts, technologies, and eras. The project has its genesis in frustration, but what emerges is hope: hope for leaving aside bad ideas and thinking about writing in more productive, inclusive, and useful ways.

2016
The Changing Story gives you assignments, resources, and examples to use in your teaching and learning. It will also help you think of ways digital stories can be used in your teaching, and help students harness the power of visual storytelling.

2018
EmpoWord is a reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class. Through both creative and traditional activities, readers are encouraged to explore a variety of rhetorical situations to become more critical agents of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in all facets of their lives. Straightforward and readable instruction sections introduce key vocabulary, concepts, and strategies. Three culminating assignments (Descriptive Personal Narrative; Text-Wrestling Analysis; Persuasive Research Essay) give students a chance to show their learning while also practicing rhetorical awareness techniques for future writing situations.

2024
Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing is a method for students to think about the social changes that were prevalent during the COVID years and remain important in their wake. Heritages of Change is a lens for thinking and writing about these ideas. Through curation and exhibition as an act of activism, students focus on a specific audience with whom they can communicate authentically about this dynamic world.

2021
This book acknowledges our changing information landscape, covering key concepts in information literacy to support a research process with intention. We start by critically examining the online environment many of us already engage with every day, looking at algorithms, the attention economy, information disorder and cynicism, information hygiene, and fact-checking. We then move into an exploration of information source types, meaningful research topics, keyword choices, effective search strategies, library resources, Web search considerations, the ethical use of information, and citation.

2019
A retired master teacher of English and Comparative Literature teams up with his son, a History professor, on a new version of the writing manual he wrote and used for decades at the University of California, Davis.

2022
Arguments are all around us. Everywhere we look, someone is trying to get our attention, change our minds, or sell us something. Learning about how persuasion works will make you a more thoughtful and skeptical consumer of all that content, so that you can come to your own conclusions and recognize the underlying assumptions that inform those attempts to persuade you. This book is about analyzing others' arguments and crafting your own. The rhetorical choices that you make as a writer–from evidence to structure to tone–impact how your audience will receive your ideas. Using those tools effectively will help your voice be heard.