Overview of Contents

The content in Literature in Context draws in large part from the most frequently-taught literary texts according to the Open Syllabus project. Open Syllabus is an open archive of the syllabus in higher education, specifically through a corpus of 21,000,000 syllabi in English, spanning 140 countries. Currently, we have approximately 100 authors represented, and almost 250 texts. We include medieval works like Beowulf up to content legally re-usable through the public domain.

Base texts are often drawn from sources like the Text Creation Partnership, Project Gutenberg, The University of Virginia’s Etext Library, or through 18th-Century Connect’s partnership with ECCO, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, to correct “dirty OCR” common when early modern texts were scanned and text-recognized. In rare cases, the texts are transcribed by hand. Library faculty help us to identify sources, for instance the source of a text from Project Gutenberg; whether that source copy is in the public domain; and whether it is an appropriate reading edition for the college classroom—whether the specific base text we want to use is a recognized classroom edition or not edited in a way that undermines it as a pedagogical tool. For instance, many versions of Robinson Crusoe on Project Gutenberg are divided into chapters, which is not how the book was originally published, and would provide readers with an inaccurate sense of the novel as a form in the early eighteenth-century.

Our database includes complete long works as well as individual shorter works—both novels, like Robinson Crusoe, and single poems, like William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow.” It also contains excerpts or portions from longer works, like our inclusion from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications or specific tales from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The project’s contents first evolved from the teaching interests of its creators, and as the project grew, it expanded to become a true source for those teaching surveys of literature in English as a whole.