Major Works With Context
Each guide opens a public-domain work through a few deep reading paths, related texts, and direct links into World Lit Reader's passage cards.
Frankenstein
Creation, mis-education, responsibility, loneliness, Gothic fear, and Shelley family context.
Hamlet
Modern inwardness, revenge, memory, forgetting, conscience, theater, and exterior foils.
The Souls of Black Folk
Double consciousness, the color line, education, Reconstruction, sorrow songs, and democracy after slavery.
Dracula
Archives, invasion anxiety, doppelgangers, modern psychology, faith, science, and the Eastern Other.
Dante's Inferno
Allegory, moderation, sin, reason's power and limits, descent, judgment, and moral order.
Pride and Prejudice
Class, manners, marriage economics, feminist readings, wit, property, and social judgment.
Jane Eyre
Voice, conscience, Gothic enclosure, education, desire, autonomy, class, and spiritual equality.
The Arabian Nights
Storytelling, nested tales, mercy, women's strength, men's folly, jinn, and sacred echoes.
The Wealth of Nations
Division of labor, tariffs, invisible hand, empire, slavery, globalization, and political economy.
Bhagavad Gita
Duty, selfless action, divine vision, inward discipline, and its impact on Thoreau, Emerson, and Schopenhauer.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Friendship, mortality, kingship, flood traditions, mythic pattern, and early ideas of heroic selfhood.
The Birth of Tragedy
Apollonian form, Dionysian force, tragedy, Schopenhauer's shadow, art, inwardness, and later writers.
A Room of One's Own
Women and authorship, feminist tradition, literary inheritance, modernist style, and critique of Romanticism.
The Republic
Justice, the cave, education, poetry, philosopher-rulers, Plato's disciples, rebels, and anti-essentialist revolts.