Classic Book Guides

The guides on this page are ones that I have made for my students, and I use them in my classroom. They are in PDF format for ease of saving and printing. You may copy and use the guides in unmodified form for noncommercial purposes only, so long as proper attribution is given.

Medieval

Old English Literature

Old English Literature

Beowulf

Elegiac Poetry

Middle English Literature

Chivalric Romance & Arthurian Literature

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Thomas Malory - The Morte d’Arthur

Geoffrey Chaucer

Early Modern

British

Early Modern Literature

William Shakespeare - Macbeth

The Metaphysical Poets

John Milton - Paradise Lost

19th Century

British Romanticism

British Romanticism

William Blake

William Wordsworth

John Keats

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mary Shelley

Victorian

Victorian Literature

Alfred Tennyson

Christina Rossetti

Arthur Conan Doyle

Bram Stoker

20th Century

British

20th C. British Literature

Modernism

William Butler Yeats

Joseph Conrad

T.S. Eliot

Virginia Woolf

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

J.R.R. Tolkien

American

H.P. Lovecraft

Literature Essays from The Codex
The Limits of Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror
The Limits of Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror

Why does Poe feel empty compared to the power of Dracula?

Sandman and the Limits of Gaiman's Myth-Making
Sandman and the Limits of Gaiman's Myth-Making

Does Neil Gaiman’s Sandman truly craft timeless myths, or is it a brilliant reflection of modern fantasy and pop culture?

Odysseus Strings His Bow
Odysseus Strings His Bow

Sometimes small moments in literature can be profoundly powerful.