English 320:  The Short Story

Some links of relevance to the course.

Even better than the links provided in the sections after this one are the ones available on several "companion websites" to various introductory textbooks on literature.  These tend to be fairly up-to-date.  Some good ones are

Literature Online!, Addison-Wesley-Longman's companion for the 8th Edition of X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia's An Introduction to Literature.  The fiction authors covered here are also featured in the 8th Edition of these author's An Introduction to Fiction.

Research Links for Michael Meyers' The Bedford Introduction to Literature, published by Bedford/St. Martin's.

Norton Topics Online is the companion to the famous Norton Anthology of English Literature.  It is organized chronologically, and provides a wealth of relevant historical and cultural information. 

The Norton Websource to American Literature offers a similar service in connection with the Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Extremely rich is the Voice of the Shuttle, a comprehensive index to resources on the Web having to do with the Humanities.  See for example its page on literature written in English.

Individual authors

In general I have limited this list to authors authors who appear on the reading list, but occasionally I have included authors whose works appear in one of our texts (even when that particular work is not on our reading list) and, even more rarely, authors that get mentioned in one or another Web page for the course.

Sherwood Anderson

The Sherwood Anderson Foundation Homepage looks like it will eventually have some good stuff, but right now its in the very beginning stages.

Margaret Atwood

There is a brief page on Atwood with a photograph and a selected bibliography. You can also check out the author's own personal homepage, the MARGARET ATWOOD INFORMATION PAGE.

Toni Cade Bambara

The Medical Humanities Database at New York University provides brief annotations for works that raise issues of interest to enlightened medical practice.  Two of Bambara's novels are treated here. 

John Barth

For an electronic version of one of Barth's recent stories, check out "Countdown: Once upon a Time" from the 1995 Mississippi Review.  (There's also a little photo of the author looking like a country & western singer.)

Jorge Luis Borges

Those of you who want to practice your Spanish are in for a great treat with the Jorge Luis Borges page.

An enticing section of "The Great Libyrinth" residing on a page at MicroSoft is devoted to Borges. It could have been called "The Library of Babel," but is instead (and perhaps more appropriately) called The Garden of Forking Paths.

Borges inspires many of his fans to elaborate their own trips, and invite others along.  An example, inspired by Borges' story "Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is the herptilian hypertext TL÷N UQBAR!

Raymond Carver

Phil Carson's Raymond Carver Page is a fine piece of work.  The excerpt from Carson's graduate paper on "Carver's Life & Art" is not to be missed.

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin: biography from The Kate Chopin Project

Kate Chopin: stories on-line (The Kate Chopin Project)

EducETH is a clearinghouse for information directed to secondary schoolteachers of English in Switzerland.  It provides a brief brief biographical entry and links on Chopin.  EducETH is something those of you who are preparing to teach literature in American secondary schools should be aware of, since many of the works for which teaching materials are provided are often taught in the states as well.

Kate Chopin: entry in Missouri Community of the Book database

Kate Chopin: entry in Medical Humanities Database (NYU)

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour  in an HTML version.

Student paper: "THE AWAKENING: Not a Healthy Book" (Washington State U honors program)

Joseph Conrad

A number of Conrad's works are available on the Web.
 
Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" (Wiretap gopher text)

Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

There are several courses on imperialism around the country that deal with issues relevant to "Heart of Darkness."

Brett Benjamin's course "Masterworks of British Literature" focusing on British Imperialism (U Texas- Austin)

Cannon Schmitt's course "Empire and the British Novel" at Grinnell College

Harriette Andreadis' course "Post-Colonial Literature (tamu.edu)

Robert Brinlee's course "Literature of the Nineteenth Century British Empire" (Virginia Tech)

There is also available on the Web a series of interesting lectures focusing on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."
 
Dintenfass: Heart of Darkness lecture

Yatzeck: Marlow's Lie

And here's more.

Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now!

IC-Achebe/Conrad 10/3

IC-Heart of Darkness 11/9/95

The Great Game Home Page

The Horror The Horror. . .

The White Man's Burden, by Rudyard Kipling

"The White Man's Burden" and Its Critics

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane: Man, Myth, & Legend

Stanley Elkin

Stanley Elkin

William Faulkner

William Faulkner: NOTICE

A Faulkner Chronology

The Writings of William Faulkner

William Faulkner links

William Faulkner on the Web

The Library

Carlos Fuentes

The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (Bibliography)

Nathanael Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

An interactive site at the University of Texas - Austin on "Young Goodman Brown."  Includes text and student commentary, plus an opportunity to add your own two cents.  There is another on "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux."

Ernest Hemingway

The English Department at the University of Florida has compiled an Ernest M. Hemingway's Home Page , with a timeline of Hemingway's career -- and lots more.
The Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park operates a museum focusing on the early years of Hemingway, who grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, which borders Chicago's western city limit.  Its page shows a picture of a room in the family house.

The Kansas City Star features the news stories the young Hemingway filed in his first job as a reporter, with the KC Star.

The Papa Page is a labor of love by Marcel Mitran.  It's a great source of photographs.
There is also a page where you can read a series of brief quotations by Hemingway.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel García Márquez - Macondo

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There's a site devoted to Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by one of Daniel Anderson's survey classes in American Literature at the University of Texas - Austin.  In addition to the text of the story, it offers Gilman's explanation "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'," the remarks of the editor who refused the story when it was submitted to The Atlantic Monthly, a message forum (to which everyone is invited to enter comments), the transcript of an on-line discussion of the ending, and a collection of several student papers submitted from across the country.  There are also links to other sites with materials relating to this story -- including a film that has been based on it..

The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Newsletter is also on-line.

Susan Glaspell

A Jury of Her Peers

Trifles: A Play in One Act

Nadine Gordimer

There is a particularly rich collection of materials on Gordimer that is part of the larger (and most impressive) "Postcolonial Web," devoted to contemporary postcolonial and postimperial writing in English.  At the Gordimer portion of this site (which is under construction), you will find links to Jay Dillemuth's biographical sketch of the author and to discussions of many aspects (political, religious, etc.) of Gordimer's fiction and views.
 
HTML texts of Gordimer's stories "Africa Emergent" and "Which New Era Would That Be?" (from Selected Stories [1975]).
 
Study guides to the short fiction in Gordimer's Selected Stories (1975):  helpful notes and questions by Paul Brians at the University of Washington.
 
An abstract of Dominic Head's book-length study of Gordimer, published by Cambridge University Press (1995).
 
An essay -- "Ethics and Aesthetics in Nadine Gordimer's Fiction" -- by Anette Horn, a doctoral student in English and German at the University of Cape Town..
 
Anette Horn's review of Gordimer's collection Jump and other Stories.
 
You might take a look at a perspective (by Natasha Elizabeth Dehn, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis) on Gordimer's predicament as a white female South African writer.

Shirley Jackson

Medical Humanities annotation on "The Lottery"

The Shirley Anne Jackson Bibliography is maintained by an organization specializing in horror fiction.

Sarah Orne Jewett

An HTML text of Jewett's novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1910) is available, by chapter, from the Bartleby Archive at Columbia University.
 
Links to plaintext versions of 6 of Jewett's novels.
 
Text of "The White Heron" with links to papers written by students at the University of Texas - Austin.

Zora Neale Hurston

The Zora Neale Hurston and Mules and Men E-project at the University of Virginia offers the African-American folktales that Hurston collected in her home town of Eatonville, Florida -- and more.

PAL:  Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is the Zora Neale Hurston page at Perspectives on American Literature.

The Teacher Resource File on Zora Neale Hurston at James Madison University has lots of useful links.

So does the page on Hurston at Writers from the Gap:  Women Writers of Color.  

Franz Kafka

For some interesting photography documenting the life of Kafka, check out the Kafka Photo Gallery maintained by Yackov Eckel.  It also has links to several other pages with material on the author.
 
C.M. Wisniewski maintains "The Castle," billed as "the oldest Kafka site on the Internet."  In addition to its own interesting material (including a chronology of Kafka's life), it provides a host of links to other Kafka-related sites.
 
The Dutch Franz Kafka Circle maintains a site offering pages in English, Nederlands (Dutch) and Deutsch (German).  It offers excellent links, too.
 
The Kafka Society of America is a resource of note, also of course providing links.
 
Constructing Franz Kafka is the project of a seminar conducted by Dr. Clark Muenzer of the German Department at the University of Pittsburgh.  Among many interesting things you'll find a brief biography of the author, and (as with the above) links to Kafka sites on the Web.
 
Finally, want to try out your German?  Check out Kurzgeschichten von Franz Kafka .

Milan Kundera

Bookwire (a commercial enterprise) has information on certain Kundera titles.
 
There's a Milan Kundera Resources Project maintained by a course at Tarleton State University.
 
Ever since leaving Czechoslovakia in the wake of Brezhnev's crushing of the "Prague Spring" (1968), Kundera has been living in France.   Recently he has even begun writing in French.  And of course he has attracted a great deal of attention from French critics.  Those of you who can read French will find this essay by Yannick Rolandeau --  "Apropos de l'oeuvre de Milan Kundera" -- a useful introduction to some of the basic technical and thematic issues raised by Kundera's fiction.
 
And, for your delectation, a fan has posted his collection of favorite passages from Kundera's work.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Start with The Unofficial Ursula K. Le Guin Page .

Interesting is AN INTERVIEW WITH URSULA LE GUIN A.D. 1988.

From Denmark there is Benny Amorsen - Ursula K. LeGuin: Always Going Home .

And from Sweden:   Ursula LeGuin

Herman Melville

The definite choice as a port of entry into Melville on the Web is the page on The Life and Works of Herman Melville.

Melville Online is a page indexed under the above which deserves separate mention here.  In it you can find all sorts of Melville texts for reading and/or downloading.

Melville, Herman. 1853. Bartleby, the Scrivener.

An HTML site offering an HTML text of " Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street".

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" is a favorite assignment in lots of literature courses around the country, and in many of these students post their responses and essays on the Web.  Try searching in AltaVista under the title of the story.  (Be sure to put it between quotation marks in the search window.)  You'll turn up lots of stuff by counterparts from all parts.

Tillie Olsen

Medical Humanities annotation on TELL ME A RIDDLE

Nebraska Center for Writers entry on Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen Papers

Tillie Olsen: a biographical note

Western Literature Association entry on Tillie Olsen

Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig
 
Pirsig on the idea of a university.
 

Edgar Allan Poe

A biography and e-texts of works by Poe (and much more) are available on the Edgar Allan Poe page maintained by Stephen Gmoser from Innsbruck, Austria.  Definitely worth a look.
 
Ready for some music inspired by Poe's eery poems and stories?  Check out the Alan Parsons Project.  (You'll need the browser add-on known as SuperSonic, but you can download it by following a link from this site.)

Katherine Anne Porter

Porter, Katherine Anne : The Jilting of Granny Weatherall  is annotated in the NYU Medical Humanities Database.

Porter, Katherine Anne: Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations  is a notice of a book that looks to be worth checking out in the library.

Review of Janis P. Stout's A SENSE OF THE TIMES (On Katherine Anne Porter)
The Katherine Anne Porter Room at the Library of the University of Maryland is mainly a repository of manuscripts for first-hand scholarly perusal, but the homepage there does offer a photograph of the author.

Porter had strong feelings about the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial.  She put them on record in "The Never-Ending Wrong" .

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Food for the Spirit - Isaac Bashevis Singer
I.B. Singer & the founding of "Forward" (with a photo)
Obituary of I.B. Singer (in Italian)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis: Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations

Jonathan Swift

"A Modest Proposal", by Jonathan Swift
"A Modest Proposal" (text)
Gulliver's Travels (the text)
Jonathan Swift, "The Dean's Manner of Living" (poem)

Leo Tolstoy

The Tolstoy Library is a place from which you can download texts of Tolstoy's works in English translation.

Peter Crane, " What Would Tolstoy Say? " is an editorial on the state of affairs in Chechnya that appeared in the Washington Post in 1995.  (Unfortunately, it is still quite current.)

A brief page titled " No Reply " is an excerpt from Tolstoy's Confessions.  You will recognize a parallel with the experience of Ivan Ilych, in an otherwise quite different situation.

Tolstoy's " The Law of Love and the Law of Violence."

Tolstoy's Letter on the Doukhobors and the Nobel Bequest .

Tolstoy's  last message to mankind .

A photo of Tolstoy in his later years is yours for the modest price of $95.

A photo of the drawing room in Tolstoy's house, which is now the site of the Lev Tolstoy Estate Museum in Khaminovniki.

Mark Twain

Advice To Little Girls by Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Mark Twain in His Times Homepage

Mark Twain on the Philippines

Mark Twain Reader.

Mark Twain Resources on the World Wide Web

Sitting in Darkness: An Unheeded Message About U.S. Militarism

The Story Of The Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain

The Story Of The Good Little Boy by Mark Twain

The War Prayer - Reader's Theater #5

Virtual Mark Twain: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Alice Walker

Alice Walker entry at QBR Guide to Black Classics


Anniina's Alice Walker Page


Walker, Alice

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty

Glossaries & Lexicons

A Glossary of Literary Criticism is directed primarily towards scholars working in the area of literary theory.


In Other Words: A Lexicon of the Humanities is a project connected with the previous item. It is as yet very much under construction.


Rhetorical Figures is another project associated with the pair just mentioned.

Writing Aids

Jack Lynch's " Grammar and Style Notes."

A handy elementary grammar elementary grammar, designed for students of English as a Second Language, has been put on-line by the English Institute.

Roane State Community College OWL is an "on-line writing lab."

Purdue University's OWL also makes available a series of useful handouts on points of grammar.

Jack Lynch (again) has done everyone a big service.  Shop around in his Resources for Writers and Writing Instructors .

Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary History, and History:  General

For the purposes of our course it is essential that you practice coming up with and testing your own notions about the works we read.  You are not expected to acquaint yourself with what other folks (chiefly professional scholars and critics of literature) have said about this or that author or work.  Indeed, spending time trying to run down what other people have published on the works we take up can be a way of postponing the real business of the course -- practice in carrying out a battery of basic moves appropriate for coming to terms with fiction.  On the other hand, you should of course be encouraged to find out more about topics you've developed an interest in. Here are some starting places.

A major resource is the Voice of the Shuttle page on English Literature at the University of California - Santa Barbara. 

Here at KSU, there is the English Subject Guide at Hale Library.

The American Studies Program at Georgetown University maintains the American Studies Web, which devotes a special page to Literature, Literary Criticism, and Hypertext.

Some other sites.  (Some links may be outdated.  The above sites are places to look first.)

Books Reviews & Literary Criticisms

Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS)

Finding Literary Criticism

Finding Literary Criticism Using the MLA Bibliography

The Internet Public Library's Online Literary Criticism Collection

Jack Lynch's On-Line Literary Sources is definitely worth a visit.

Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures

American Literature On-Line (at University of Missouri)

American Literature links (Sally Anne, UK)

The English Page at EDUceth in Switzerland has useful materials directed to secondary school teachers.

The BookWire Author Index has compiled a set of links many of which you would be unlikely to run across elsewhere, including sites with rich links of their own.  Some (like BookWire itself) are commercial enterprises, but many aren't.

The Naked Word: Public Domain eBooks and eText offers plaintext documents for unrestricted copying and distribution.

One compilation of literature available in the public domain in English resides in Denmark:  it's called simply Fiction, but it has links to other pages on drama and poetry, as well as to other compilations worth exploring.

BIBLIOMANIA, The Network Library: Home Page

The Libyrinth of Allexamina, Forth-Wander of the Modern Word

Electronic Texts and Interactive Platforms in American Literature

Authors Links & Info

Creating A Celebration of Women Writers

Annotated Bibliography of Feminist Aesthetics in the Literary, Performing & Visual Arts

Select List of Feminist Scholarship & Literary Criticism Applicable to Youth Literature

Jewish American Literature Research Homepage

LITERARY CRITICISM & JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

LITERARY CRITICISM & AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Web Resources on African American Writers and Literature

LITERARY CRITICISM AND ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Literary Kicks (intro to the Beat Generation)

Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism [focus on Herbert Simon].

The Web itself, and the hypertextuality that it exploits, has helped to inspire new experiments in fiction.  Here are a couple of places where you can take a peek at what's going on.

Hyperizons: the Search for Hypertext Fiction

There is a course at Duke on Reading and Writing Texts and Hypertexts .

Finally, two immense collections of links to all sorts of subjects, are:

The WWW Virtual Library , maintained by the WorldWideWeb Consortium, and

ALIWEB .

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2001 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

  This page last updated 15 January 2003.