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=Welcome to Literapedia!=

Literapedia is a web experiment being conducted by an English literature teacher and his students. Since March of 2007 this site has provided interpretation-free book notes on great works of literature. Since these book notes do not seek to analyze the texts, they will be useful only to students who actually have read or are reading the texts--not to students seeking a shortcut.

List of Book Notes

 * Adams, Douglas—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
 * Austen, Jane—Pride and Prejudice
 * Barker, Pat—Regeneration
 * Bellamy, Edward—Looking Backward
 * Bronte, Charlotte—Jane Eyre
 * Bronte, Emily—Wuthering Heights
 * Burgess, Anthony—A Clockwork Orange
 * Camus, Albert—L'Etranger
 * Card, Orson Scott—Ender's Game
 * Capote, Truman—Breakfast at Tiffany's, In Cold Blood
 * Cisneros, Sandra—The House on Mango Street
 * Conrad, Joseph—Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent
 * Crane, Stephen—The Red Badge of Courage
 * Defoe, Daniel--Robinson Crusoe
 * Dickens, Charles—Great Expectations
 * Dinesen, Isak—Out of Africa
 * Du Maurier, Daphne—Rebecca
 * Eliot, George—The Mill on the Floss
 * Faulkner, William—As I Lay Dying
 * Fitzgerald, F. Scott—Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise
 * Frank, Anne—The Diary of a Young Girl
 * Franklin, Benjamin—The Autobiography
 * Golding, William—Lord of the Flies , The Inheritors  
 * Hawthorne, Nathaniel—The Scarlet Letter
 * Heller, Joseph—Catch-22
 * Herbert, Frank—Dune
 * Hemingway, Ernest—A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea
 * Hilton, James—Goodbye, Mr. Chips
 * Hosseini, Khaled—The Kite Runner
 * Huxley, Aldous—Brave New World
 * Kafka, Franz—The Trial
 * Kerouac, Jack—On the Road
 * Kesey, Ken—One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
 * Knowles, John-—A Separate Peace
 * Le Guin, Ursula K.—The Left Hand of Darkness
 * Lee, Harper—To Kill a Mockingbird
 * Lewis, C.S.—Out of the Silent Planet
 * London, Jack—The Call of the Wild
 * Mahfouz, Naguib—Fountain and Tomb, Miramar
 * Márquez, Gabriel García—One Hundred Years of Solitude
 * McEwan, Ian—Atonement
 * McInerney, Jay—Bright Lights, Big City
 * Mitchell, Margaret—Gone with the Wind
 * O'Brien, Tim—The Things They Carried
 * Ondaatje, Michael—The English Patient
 * Orwell, George—1984, Animal Farm
 * Paton, Alan—Cry, the Beloved Country
 * Plato—The Apology, Crito, Ion, Laches, Lesser Hippias
 * Remarque, Erich Maria— All Quiet on the Western Front, A Time to Love and a Time to Die
 * Salinger, J.D.—Franny and Zooey
 * Sophocles—Antigone, Oedipus the King
 * Steinbeck, John—The Grapes of Wrath
 * Stevenson, Robert Louis—Treasure Island
 * Styron, William—Sophie's Choice
 * Swift, Jonathan—Gulliver's Travels
 * Tan, Amy—The Joy Luck Club
 * Tolkien, J. R. R.—The Hobbit
 * Toole, John Kennedy—A Confederacy of Dunces
 * Twain, Mark—A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
 * Unknown—Beowulf
 * Voltaire—Candide
 * Vonnegut, Kurt—Slaughterhouse Five
 * Wells, H.G.—The Time Machine
 * Wharton, Edith—The Age of Innocence
 * White, T.H.—The Once and Future King
 * Wilde, Oscar—The Picture of Dorian Gray
 * Williams, Tennessee—The Glass Menagerie
 * Woolf, Virginia—To the Lighthouse
 * Xenophon—Anabasis: The Persian Expedition

Rationale
For a number of years, I have created for my students book notes on the books we are reading in class. These are provided in lieu of commercial literature guides, which I ask my students not to use.

I don't like for my students to read Cliff Notes, Spark Notes, and their ilk, because they typically provide an interpretation of the works. I would much prefer that my students devise their own interpretations.

For this reason, the book notes I provide are as devoid of interpretation as I can make them. They typically contain short plot synopses by chapter and a character list with short descriptions. The book notes are designed to be useful to students reading the text, writng a paper, discussing the text, and/or reviewing for a test.

With the advent of Wikis, it became apparent to me that I could share the responsibility for creating these notes with my students, and that creating the notes could become a learning process in itself.