Literature reading list
Trying to do a literature curriculum. Currently very much in the planning stage!
🚧 Still to add: poetry, mediaeval, all non fic inc ancient, non-western. Cervantes.
Note to self: do not count the books! No good will come of this. You don't need to know.
Ancient literature
- Homer
- Virgil
- Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes
- Terence
- Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
- Herodotus, Plutarch, Thucydides, Livy
- Ptolemy: Almagest
- Euclid
Epic of Gilgamesh- Confucius: The Analects
- Mencius / Mengzi
- Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung: The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean
- Laozi: Daodejing
- Augustine:
Essays
Mediæval
- Chaucer
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms
- Classic Chinese Novels
Renaissance?
- Copernicus
- Kepler
MachiavelliMontaigne- Spenser, Faerie Queen
- Shakespeare.
Companion reading:
- Frank Kermode: Shakespeare’s Language
- AD Nuttall: Shakespeare The Thinker
- Jonathan Bate: Soul of the Age
- James Shapiro: 1606
Similarly:
- Moliere: Tartuffe
- Racine: Phèdre
- Milton
- Dante
- Pascal: Pensées (Flora Poste's favourite)
18th C
- Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, his non fiction
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
- Samuel Richardson: Pamela
- Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
- Lawrence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
- Goethe:
Young Werther
Companion reading:
- Ian Watt: The Rise of the Novel
19th C
- Austen.
- All the Brontës
- Mary Shelley:
Frankenstein - Walter Scott: Ivanhoe,
Waverley - Dickens: David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend
- Eliot: Middlemarch (all?)
- Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
- Thackeray: Vanity Fair (because I love it)
- Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis translation)
- Tolstoy: War and Peace,
Anna Karenina - Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
- Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Double
- Trollope: The Way We Live Now
- Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Wells:
The Invisible Man - Proust: In Search of Lost Time
- Twain:
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
Missing: The gothic, Mystery of Udolpho etc. Hawthorne Scarlet Letter? Flipping Moby Dick probably.
Companion reading:
- John Mullan: What Matters in Jane Austen, The Artful Dickens
- James Wood:
How Fiction Works - David Lodge: The Art of Fiction
- Marilyn Butler: Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
- Michael Chwe: Jane Austen, Game Theorist
- Jenny Davidson: Reading Jane Austen
- Claire Carlisle: The Marriage Question
- Claire Tomalin: Thomas Hardy
- Boris Eikhenbaum: Tolstoy in the Sixties
20th C
- Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Kafka: Stories
- Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet
- EM Forster: Room with a View
- Henry James: Finally finish Portrait of a Lady! Then more James, inc The Golden Bowl (Gorra, Portrait of a Novel)
- Woolf: Mrs Dalloway. To the Lighthouse. The Waves
- Joyce:
Ulysses, not again, please. Portrait of the Artist - Katherine Mansfield: The Garden Party
- I've got a bunch more Modernism I want to do
- Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
- DH Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover
- Elizabeth Bowen: The Death of the Heart (does sound like something I would like)
- Evelyn Waugh: Scoop
- Graham Greene: The End of the Affair
- Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows
- Elizabeth Jenkins: The Tortoise and the Hare
- Iris Murdoch: The Sea, The Sea
- Penelope Fitzgerald: The Beginning of Spring
- Miller: View from a Bridge, The Crucible [plays]
Missing:
Non-fiction Literary criticism Johnson Preface to Shakespare, Selected Lives of the Poets Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Hazlitt, Selected essays Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Woolf, The Common Reader or Selected Essays Tolkien, Of Fairy Stories C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, Of This And Other Worlds Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
English Biography Aubrey Short Lives Walton’s Lives (esp. The Life of Donne) Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage James Boswell, Life of Johnson Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte Froude’s Life of Carlyle J.S. Mill, Autobiography Strachey Eminent Victorians
Essays The best place to start is the Oxford Book of Essays, but here are some choices for dipping into. Bacon, Essays (try ‘Of Gardens’ or ‘Of Great Place’) Swift, Drapier’s Letters Addison, Spectator Johnson, Selected Essays George Orwell, Essays (ignore his “writing rules”, it’s total rubbish)
More: Books that I have? Terry Eagleton. Intro to Theory of Literature with Paul H Fry. Harold Bloom.
Non fiction! EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. The Condition Of The Working-class In England In 1844, Engels (archive.org), Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Stephen Hawking. Vindication. Feminine Mystique / Second Sex. Room of One's Own. Darwin (got). John Stuart Mill, Liberty. Walden, probably. Mary Seacole. Frederick Douglass. Olaudah Equiano. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Burke. The Wealth of Nations. Common Sense. Treatise of Human Nature. A bio of Samuel Johnson. Locke, Human Understanding. Pepys! (got?) Leviathan. Marx. Descartes, Aquinas, Rousseau. Hannah Arendt. Bacon. Greeks, Romans, Confucius etc - another ancient philosophical-type list. Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution - or save for the French Revolution reading list?