Themepark
Literature speaks to the mind and to the emotions. It stirs our imaginations and enhances our experiences. Some literature is timeless; its appeal remains constant from generation to generation.
Sample some of the following activities to learn more about classic literature.
The following are places to go (some real and some virtual) to find out about classic literature.
Virtually visit the home where young Anne Frank wrote her famous diary
Travel to Camelot and discuss the Arthurian legend with Arthurian scholars
Visit Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
Travel to Hannibal, Missouri, the birthplace of Mark Twain. Visit his boyhood home, take a virtual float down the Mississippi, and see where Becky Thatcher lived
Travel to Middle Earth and meet Bilbo and learn about author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Besides being an author, Tolkien was also a medieval scholar.
Virtually vist dozens of homes and locales where famous authors or literary characters lived. You can visit Arthur's Tintagel, Shylock's Venice, Wordsworth's Lake District, Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Thomas Hardy's Dorset, Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen's) Rungstedlund, and dozens more
This site recognizes the contributions of women writers throughout history. Women have written almost every imaginable type of work: novels, poems, letters, biographies, travel books, religious commentaries, histories, economic and scientific works.
Spend some time with Dante and see if he's still following Beatrice around. Find out about the upcoming multimedia translation of The Divine Comedy. The site has tips for teachers using Dante in the classroom
Get to know Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. According to this site, "The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol."
Get to know Herman Melville. He had incredible experiences in the South Pacific while working on a whaling ship. He was good friends with Nathanial Hawthorne
Talk with Jane Austen and find out who her favorite characters were....Elizabeth Bennet? Catherine Morland? Jane Fairfax? Mary Crawford?
Mark Twain was an American original. He was a Mississippi River pilot, a gold miner, a newspaper writer, a novelist, a political satirist. From this site, you can see some actual photos of this author of American classics
Meet Achilles and Ajax and Helen and Orestes and all the rest of the gang from Homer's Odyssey
Chat with Stephen Crane. He was a novelist, poet, and short-story writer, and he only lived to be 28 years old.Explore the themes and issues in this writings as well as his literary techniques
Get to know Willa Cather. Some of her most famous novels reflect her early life in the late 1800s on the Nebraska prairie frontier
Spend time with William Faulkner. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha county, an imaginary area in Mississippi
Listen to the tales from Canterbury
This site features 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors. It is searchable by work or author.
This site makes available the full text of hundreds of written works of literature in an electronic form.
Find study guides for 100 classic books. This site is sort of like Cliff's Notes online
Bibliography
- Christelow, Eileen. What Do Authors Do? New York: Clarion Books, c1995.
- Hunter, Shaun. Writers. New York, NY: Crabtree Pub., c1998.
- Krull, Kathleen. Lives of the Writers: Comedies, Tragedies (And What the Neighbors Thought). San Diego: Harcourt Brace, c1994.