The Public Domain Core 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