Titles in the Collection

The eCampusOntario Public Domain Core Collection consists of over 50 titles that are available to all readers.  You can use these texts in your courses as they are or you can choose to create a customized version of any text that reflects your teaching and learning objectives.  A customized version might include supplementary content such as an introduction, annotations, glossaries, images and provide opportunities for students to contribute to the text.

Titles were chosen for this collection based on the following criteria:

• Relevance to post-secondary courses taught in Ontario
• Frequency of appearance on syllabi listed in the Open Syllabus Project
• Proposed usage in open assignments in courses at Ryerson and Brock universities during the Fall 2021 semester
• Inclusion of underrepresented voices (including titles by BIPOC authors)
• In the public domain

As of March 2022, the titles in the collection include:

Antigone by Sophocles

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes

The Book of Small by Emily Carr

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

Flint and Feather by E. Pauline Johnson

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Future of the American Negro by Booker T. Washington

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

In Old Plantation Days by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs

An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica by Herbert G. de Lisser

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

The Life History and Travels of Kah-ge-gah-bowh, 1847 by George Copway

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Myths of the Greek and Roman Gods edited by Roberto Nickel

Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb by Henry Bibb

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

Oroonoko by Aphra Behn

Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Poems by Claude McKay

Poetics by Aristotle

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew

Republic by Plato

Roughing it in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Sketches of Southern Life by Frances Harper

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Underground Railroad by William Still

Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill

Victorian Anthology by multiple authors

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

The White Witch of Rosehall by Herbert G. de. Lisser

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman