Literature

       General sites and dictionaries


In 1971 professor Michael Hart recieved a computer time account at University of Illinois's "Xerox Sigma V" mainframe worth $100,000,000. This apparently wasn't as serious as it would seem at first glance, since the operators had more processing power than they knew what to do with (mind-boggling thought). With this seemingly endless amount of computer power at his disposal, professor H. concieved one of the most ambitious -and oldest - projects on the Net: namely the honorable PROJECT GUTENBERG. This project has since then converted hundreds and hundreds of Public Domain books to .TXT-format, a.k.a. Plain Vanilla Text. The increasingly heavy-handed copyright laws the world over has put a serious stick in the Project's wheel, but Project Guthenberg still lives. Here you can download (in easily read text-format, with minimum download times) classic texts like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, or all the books in the Oz-series, or Jane Austen.

(To go directly to the section for download of E-texts, Go here!)

Brown University Scholarly Technology Group is a group at Brown University dedicated to developing, evaluating and spreading creative uses of existing technology for distribution of information and support to education.

Their site contains services and ideas to help teachers, principals and other professional educaters, but there are also items of more general interest, such as the Victorian Web.

An interesting site is the newly established Alexandria Digital Library. This, folks, is true Cybercommunity: there is a big list of books and authors. First you must look up the books you have already read, and give them a rating. The program then looks at your ratings, and looks at the ratings of other poeple. The idea is that if someone has given the same books the same ratings as you, you probably have the same taste; so the server promotes any books the other guy has rated but the you haven't read to you, and vice versa. The success of this site is directly linked to the number of participants, so its really you who decide if this endeavour will survive follow the fate of its namesake.

The people at the on-line bookstore Amazon.com claim it to be the biggest bookstore on the Net. Well, tell y' wut m'little honies, see I dunnow about that, but it suuure is big.

If you are fond of Shakespeare, but find the language difficult -or better yet, if you really couldn't care less about Shakespeare but your english teacher doesn't agree- you should check out this On-line Shakespeare. This great site contains all Shakespeare's works, in hypertext format, with all the difficult and obsolete words linked to their explanations in an on-line dictionary.

The On-line version of the Oxford English Dictionary is another service provided by STG at Brown University.

Lexical FreeNet is the most advanced dictionary I have ever seen: you can easily set it up to find synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, logical realtions and common assosciations for your word.

The Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary contains over 160,000 english words, enough so that you shouldn't reasonably be left hanging.

Fast Dictionary Search Utility is a complete and easy-to-use dictionary service, where you just enter a word and choose a dictionary from a wide range of options, from monolingual Catalan to Swedish-English translation dictionary.

The Victorian Web is a well ordered, well stuffed academic site with detailed biographies on many classic authors, as well as the society they lived in.





         Individual Authors

Michael Crichton is the man behind such succesful movies as Jurassic Park, The Great Train Robbery, Disclosure and ER (the TV-series). He attended the Harvard Medical School, but found the job (and the sometimes callous community of doctors) not quite to his taste. Instead he began writing, putting his past experiences in his books.

  1. A Michael Crichton Web Site by Cliff Corder. Interesting, wellstuffed and with a fun twist: you can choose to see a well-ordered page with conventional layout appealing to the left half of the brain, or a montage imagemap with links to a more artistical site, but containing the same information, directed at the right brain-half.

  2. Kyle Browning's Michael Crichton Homepage is great. Among other things it contains a detailed biography.

Some fifty years ago, the publishing houses in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, got a manuscript for a children's book in the mail. The story, about a superstrong and superstrongheaded girl with a funny name, was considered immoral and unwanted. All the publishers refuted the story. All except the Raben & Sjögren publishing house, which had published the author once before, when she won a second prize at their children's books-contest. A proverb says "Nothing ventured, nothing gained". Never has that been more true: If Raben & Sjögren had not taken a chance on Astrid Lindgren, the world could have been a very different, and difficult, place. And, incidentally, R & S would not have gained the money and prestige they did, when Astrid Lindgren stuck with them as her sole publisher in Sweden.
  1. Jane Foo's Astrid Lindgren appreciation page.

  2. Astrid Lindgrens Värld (A.L:s World) is a themepark in Vimmerby, Lindgren's place of birth. This is their english homepage.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, is one of american literature's best and foremost. A tortured soul, he was a master poet, the father of the short story, renovator of the psychological thriller, and pioneer of a new genre: the detective story. For the newly converted and the curious heathen, I recommend the Raven.
  1. Stefan Gmoser's Edgar Allan Poe page contains copies of what reasonably should be the author's entire production.

  2. Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher is a gothic place, shaped after one of Poe's stories, The Fall of the House of Usher.

  3. Qrisse's Edgar Allan Poe Pages is The site for Poe related information. One shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but this time it would be accurate.

At the turn of the century, in Russia, was born Vladimir Nabokov. Years later, in America, he wrote the controversial novell Lolita (all of you who searched for the unnameable word (actually I could name it, but then more of you would come here, looking for something that isn't there), this is in fact where that usage of the word Lolita comes from). It is a story about a middleaged man who falls in love with the seductive, 12-year old "nymphette" Lolita, and starts a relationship with her. This story, which broke records over the world for being banned, is one of the finest and strongest works in english literature, wether you like the theme or not. Lolita wasn't the only book of Nabokov's to be banned, or to contain forbidden sex. Here are some sites dedicated to Nabokov.
  1. English 102 Lolita Webpage is a scholarly site about the author and his works created by the english 102 class at the University of Arizona -97.

  2. Genius Ignored is about the missunderstood artists of history. It puts Nabokov right up beside Rembrandt, Bach and Van Gogh.

  3. Zembla is another site dedicated to Nabokov, but with more love this time.



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