The Heath Anthology particularly encourages this range of approaches because, in this sense, the view of American literature underwriting the Heath is what we might call a "post-print" paradigm: not linear but multilinear, not univocal but dialogic, organized not to tell a story, but to open up a complicated matrix of issues and perspectives. Bass sees the online guide to the Heath Anthology as a way to create a text in the broader sense of the word: an interwoven set of resources that contribute to a greater range of knowledge than is possible with conventional textbooks.
Toward this end, the Heath Anthology site is comprised of two kinds of materials: essays originally written for print publication and converted to hypertext format, such as the instructor's guide and the Heath Anthology Newsletter; and external links to Web resources on subjects and authors covered by the textbook. The opening page divides these resources into three parts:
1. Overviews and News, including essays on teaching literature with
technology and links to sites.
2. Instructor Resources:
-- Hypertext Syllabus Builder, A Resource for Teaching the American
Literatures. This section is comprised of a series of course outlines for
various courses in American literature. Hypertext Instructor's Guide, John
Alberti, Editor. This section contains the Instructor's Guide in an easily
navigable hypertext version.
-- American Literature Curriculum Resources: Links to American literature
courses on the Web.
-- The Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures (T-AMLIT):
Archives of T-Amlit, which flourished circa 1995-1998 and produced a host of
good suggestions and bibliographic references for teaching American
literature.
3. Student Resources:
-- American Literature resources, primarily sites on American authors,
organized according to the table of contents of Volumes I and II of the
Heath Anthology
-- Texts and Contexts: Thematic Connections, links to sites that consider
American literature, history, and culture.
Of these resources, by far the most valuable are the hyperlinked essays that comprise the bulk of the content housed at the site. Written for the instructor's manual by well-known scholars in the field, these essays provide background information on the author, effective approaches to the text, and helpful bibliographical references. For some of the lesser-known authors, these essays are the most useful, and indeed almost the only, resources available on the Web. Particularly interesting to those teaching non-canonical writers are the introductory essays on selected topics, such as Andrew Wiget's overview of Native American oral literatures, that appeared originally in the Heath Anthology Newsletter. Those teaching American literature will find this part of the site both easy to navigate and useful.
Also very useful are the materials for courses in American literature. This excellent section includes exam questions and paper topics as well as the schedule of assignments, and each syllabus is annotated with the instructor's rationale for including certain features and questions. In addition, materials are effectively cross-referenced by pedagogical approach as well as subject, so readers can easily find information on discussion questions, reading journals, quizzes, reports, and other activities.
This site encompasses links to sites on almost all of the authors and also provides brief annotations for each link. These links include many of the well-established and better-known sites on various topics, including Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle and Paul Reuben's Perspectives on American Literature. Overall, however, the pages of links are less successful than they might be because they are outdated. Although many links are still good, many of the pages have not been updated since 1998, with the result that many links are dead and others direct visitors to new locations. On one page for women's studies links, for example, four out of eight sites had either moved or become totally inoperative; one large site, the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writer's web, had moved from its former site more than two years ago. The Instructor's Resources Curriculum Page of Dynamic Syllabi (http://www.hmco.com/college/english/heath/dyn_syllabi.html) contained ten links; of these ten, three were live, six were dead, and three had pages to redirect the visitor, with one redirect page dating from 1997. Navigating through the redirected URLs is possible, of course, but hunting down the sites for dead links can be an exercise in frustration.
A related problem is that important sites of more recent vintage are omitted. For example, the "Online American Literature" resources page lists only one site on American Transcendentalism, and omits entirely Ann Woodlief's American Transcendentalism site with its rich collection of texts and links. On occasion, relatively minor sites or collections of links rather than major ones represent the resources on an author. For example, the section on regional writer Constance Fenimore Woolson does not include the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society's site, which contains links and authoritative biographical information. Still, the site generally links to solid sources, and the problems could easily be eliminated with thorough and consistent updating.
The Heath Anthology site is a useful stop for students and an essential one for instructors looking for authoritative information about American authors. Since it provides what all too many websites do not--rich content--it is an important site to consult when teaching American literature, and it should be the first site to visit when teaching a lesser-known author. In short, what the site does well, it does very well indeed: providing scholarly perspectives, informative backgrounds, and excellent suggestions for pedagogy in American literature.