This series also strives to introduce students to complex issues regarding cultural influences, political contexts, and interpretations. Here are some of the tools which accomplish this:

Contexts

Contexts are brief descriptions of important ideas, people, and historical events which influenced the writers profiled in the American Renaissance Series. Click on a topic to read read selections from the CD-ROM series--

Greek Tragedy & Myth
Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Idealism
Hawthorne and the Custom-House
Melville, Montaigne, and Skepticism
Plotinus and Neo-Platonism
Was Twain a Racist?

Thematic Hyper-Links*

Thematic Hyper-Links allow a user to trace recurring themes and images in a given literary work, thereby allowing them to get an idea of how to read critically. For instance, characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn repeatedly make transactions involving Jim and $40. Our links allow an end user to trace these transactions and connect Tom Sawyer to the king and to hunters of runaway slaves:

Click Here for an example of our thematic hyperlinks.

Conrad Links

Seeing & Perceiving
Imperceptibility
Civilization vs. "Savagery"
Blankness
Kurtz's Egoism
Death
The African and the Intended

 Twain

Jim: Father or Buffoon?
Ironic Uses of Huck
Huck, Tom, and Books
$40 and Jim
Melville

Loom of Fate Metaphor
Philosophers and Narcissists
Sea vs. Land
Ishmael's Communalism

 Hawthorne

Artists vs. Materialists
The Puritan Tradition
Religious Imagery
Lighting and Imagination

*-(Not available on New England Transcendentalists)