Beatrice and her friends are from the Digital Dante Project at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University. ILT is becoming quite an extraordinary place and well worth a visit. For instance, the following authors (and there's more!) are the subject of digital text projects at ILT: Aristotle | Bentham | Berkeley | Dante | Descartes | Dewey | Emerson | Hegel | Hobbes | Hume | Kant | Leibniz | Locke | Machiavelli | Mill | Plato | Rousseau | Socrates | Spinoza | Vergil
Are these guys a mite too heavy? Try some 'net novels, fancifully titled Cyber-Books to Explore On-Line by Pioneering Internet Authors. I have a short list of some eclectic reading on the web, and some of my favorite poems. Guides at About.com will take you around the web for everything from Books for Kids, Classic and Contemporary Literature, to Poetry, Quotations, and Women writers. Guaranteed to improve your mind (or fill your time) while you're online!
Want more traditional fare? A la carte? Visit Books Online. Established at C-MU in 1993, and formerly associated with the English Server (now eserver.org with Fiction, Eighteenth Century, Drama, Feminism, Gender and Sexuality, Marx and Engels, New Poetry, Race, Philosophy, among other challenging topics), this venerable resource is now at the Penn Digital Library. It has a search engine for author or title, and -- what I really like -- you can browse the lists by author, title, and subject. There are also several of the original features now on the new server, to wit, A Celebration of Women Writers (an extraordinary list -- I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of this subject on the 'net), Banned Books On-Line (amusing and informative, as you might expect), and Prize Winners On-Line with the Newbery, Nobel, and Pulitzer official home pages and lists of prize winners, plus offerings to read online. Wild, eh? When I'm at this site, I'm in hog heaven!
Another important portal to reading on the 'net is the Online Texts Collection at the Internet Public Library. This resource catalogs over 19,000 titles that can be searched, or browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification.
Are your reading habits of a more contemplative turn? Try some of the selections at my Christianity on the Web page. With links to pages with everything from Aquinas through Knox to Lewis.
Is religion and religious history too tiresome at times? Want some lighter fare? Check out Lite Literature on the Web and some favorite poems of mine to relax and enjoy yourself.
Don't like a la carte? Prefer table d'hote? Here are some wonderful meta-indices of literary sites and e-texts online, and some seriously idiosyncratic selections.
times since October 3, 1997