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Literature

Terms in this set (739)

John Smith
Generall Historie of Virginia New England and the Summer Isles
William Bradford
History of Plimmoth Plantation
John Winthrop
History of New England
Increase Mather
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences
Cotton Mather
Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of NE from its First Planting
Thomas Morton
New English Canaan
John Mason
Brief History of the Pequod War
Mary Rowlandson
(wrote about captivity by Wampanoags under King Philip [Metacomet, son of
Massasoit])
Thomas Weld, Richarad Mather, John Eliot
Bay Psalm Book (Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully
Translated into English Meter)
Anne Bradstreet
Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (poems including A Dialogue
between Old England and New, Four Elements, Four Constitutions, Four Ages of Man,
Four Seasons, Four Monarchies, and Contemplations)
Edward Taylor
Poetcial Works, God's Determinations Touching His Elect
Michael Wigglesworth
Day of Doom (sinners and unbaptized infants condemned to Hell on Day
of Judgement)
George Alsop
A Character of the Province of Maryland
Daniel Denton
A Brief Description of New York
Johnathan Edwards
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising
Work of God, Freedom of the Will
William Byrd
History of the Dividing Line, Secret Diary, Another Secret Diary
Lucy Terry
(first by black American) Bar's Fight August 28 1746
Jupiter Hammon
(black slave) An Evening Thought Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries
Phillis Wheatley
(first famous black) Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral
Publick Occurences
(first newspaper, Boston, 1690)
John Campbell
Boston News-Leter (first regular newspaper, 1704)
Andrew Bradford
American Magazine (one of first two magazines, 1741)
Benjamin Franklin
General Magazine and Historical Chronicle (one of first two magazines,
1741), Autobiography, Poor Richard's Almanack (Richard Saunders)
Crevecoeur (J. Hector St. John)
Letters from an American Farmer
John Jay, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton
The Federalist
Thomas Paine
Common Sense, Crisis, Age of Reason (controversial book expounding deism),
The Rights of Man (defends French Revolution)
Hartford Wits
were a group of young writers from Connecticut. Originally the Connecticut Wits, this group formed in the late eighteenth century as a literary society at Yale College and then assumed a new name
John Trumbull
M'Fingal (American Revolution: Scotch-American Tory orator M'Fingal is tarred and feathered and repents)
Timothy Dwight (grandson of Jonathan Edwards)
The Conquest of Canaan, The
Triumph of Infidelity, Greenfield Hill
Joel Barlow
Hasty Pudding
Philip Freneau
House of Night
Olaudah Equiano
(freed slave) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African
William Brown
Power of Sympathy (first American novel; Harrington can't marry Harriot Fawcett because she is his half-sister; both die)
Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Modern Chivalry (Captain Farrago and Teague O'Regan travel, seeing unqualified office holders, including Teague)
Charles Brown
Wieland or the Transformation (first American novel popular in Europe), Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly
Washington Irving
(the "American Goldsmith")
A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (satire of historians), Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (including Rip Van Winkle [Rip Van Winkle drinks from dwarf's keg with dog Wolf in Catskills and sleeps for 20 years; like German
Peter Klaus], Sleepy Hollow [schoolmater Ichabod Crane loves Katrina Van Tassel but is scared away by rival Brom Bones who masquerades as headless horseman]), The Alhambra, A Tour of the Praires, biographies of Columbus and Washington
William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis, Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, edited New York Post
James Fenimore Cooper
Leatherstocking series: Pioneers (Templeton, NY: Natty Bumppo punished for killing deer while others kill many pigeons; Elizabeth Temple marries Edward Effingham, resolving question of Judge Temple's lands),
Last of the Mohicans (Alice and Cora Munro try to join father at Fort William Henry; opposed by Hurons under Magua; Uncas, his dad Delaware Chief Chingachgook, and Hawkeye [Natty Bumppo] oppose Hurons), Prairie (old Natty Bumppo dies; Ishmael Bush squatters), Pathfinder (Pathfinder dumps Mabel Dunham when he learns she loves
suspected but vindicated traitor Jasper Western; Indian heroine Dew-of-June), Deerslayer (Lake Otsego [Glimmerglass], NY: Natty Bumppo and Hurry Harry
March fight Hurons; Judith Hunter fails to interest Natty);
Pilot,
Spy,
Littlepage Manuscripts (Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, The Redskins; tenants of NY
patrons refuse to pay rent)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Evangeline (Gabriel Lajeunesse sent to LA and Evangeline Bellefontaine to NE
when Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia; meet again in Philadelphia where
she is nurse and he dies) ,
Song of Hiawatha (Ojibway Indian Hiawatha raised by grandmother Nokomis, daughter of
the moon; revenges mom Wenonah against dad West Wind; teaches peace with
whites; wife Minnehaha becomes ill and they go to Northwest Wind),
Courtship of Miles Standish (Plymouth Plantation: shy military man Miles
Standish asks John Alden to woo Priscilla Mullins for him, but she marries John
instead, and Miles gives blessing),
translated the Divine Comedy,
My Lost Youth (youth in Portland ME),
Village Blacksmith,
The Building of the Ship,
The Children's Hour,
The Wreck of the Hesperus,
Tales of a Wayside Inn (collection of poems in style of Canterbury Tales;
includes Paul Revere's Ride, Elizabeth, The Battle of Carmilhan, Emma and
Eginhard, The Saga of King Olaf)
James Russell Lowell
The Biglow Papers, Harvard Commemoration Ode (in honor of Civil War dead), Among My Books, A Fable for Critics, edited the Atlantic Monthly
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table;
The Chambered Nautilus (sea creature enlarges its shell as it grows),
The Deacon's Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay (shay fell apart,
satirizing Calvinist permanence),
Elsie Venner A Romance of Destiny (Elsie Venner has serpentine qualities
because mom was bitten by snake; loves Bernard Langdon but she dies),
Old Ironsides (saved USS Constitution from being scrapped)
John Greenleaf Whittier
(sometimes included in Cambridge Poets) Snow-Bound,
Massachusetts to Virginia (anti-slavery), Barbara Frietchie, Maud Muller (judge and Maude meet; "It might have been"), Telling the Bees
Frederick Douglass
(escaped slave) - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
William Wells Brown
(escaped slave) - Clotel (about racial intermarriage, first novel by black American)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American Scholar, Nature, Address at Divinity College (stressed Christ's humanity and man's divinity), Essays, Self-Reliance, Compensation (evil and good balance each other), Concord Hymn, Days, Merlin, The Over-Soul, Representative Men (Shakespeare, Plato, Goethe, Swedenborg, Napoleon, Montaigne)
Henry David Thoreau
Walden or Life in the Woods (about simple life near Concord NH), Civil Disobedience ("that government is best which governs least"), Life Without Principle
Count Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter (Salem: Hestor Prynne forced to wear A for committing adultery but
won't reveal dad's name; physician husband Richard Chillingsworth suspects minister
Arthur Dimmesdale, who dies after confessing; daughter Pearl finally cries),
Twice-Told Tales (tales including Howe's Masquerade, The Grey Champion, The Great
Carbuncle, and The Minister's Black Veil; title from King John),
Mosses from an Old Manse (25 stories including Young Goodman Brown [Puritan Brown, led by
old man, observes wife Faith at a witches' Sabbath in the woods and returns to Salem a
sad man], The Birthmark [Aylmer removes birthmark from perfect wife Georgiana, killing her],
Rappaccini's Daughter [doctor Rappaccini nourishes daughter Beatrice on poisons so
she may help with dangerous plant experiments; she dies drinking antidote from faithless
suitor], and The Celestial Railroad),
House of the Seven Gables (Salem: Colonel Pyncheon obtained land for House of Seven
Gables by accusing owner Matthew Maule of witchcraft; Maule cursed Pyncheons;
Clifford Pyncheon jailed for murder of uncle actually committed by Judge Jaffrey
Pyncheon; Phoebe and Holgrave, a descendant of Maule, fall in love and break the curse),
Marble Faun (Italian count Donatello loves Miriam and kills her pursuer Antonio; artist
Hilda witnesses murder, confesses to priest, and loves Kenyon),
Blithedale Romance (based on Brook Farm; Miles Coverdale narrates; Zenobia loves
Hollingsworth who loves Priscilla),
Fanshawe (Fanshawe loves Ellen Langdon, ward of Harley College President Dr.
Melmoth but gives her to man she loves and dies; modeled on Bowdoin),
The Dolliver Romance (unfinished; Dr. Dolliver makes elixir to care for granddaughter
Pansie but Colonel Dabney wants it for selfish reasons and dies),
Tanglewood Tales
Herman Melville
Typee A Peep at Polynesian Life (hero and friend Toby jump ship in Marquesas Islands
and wander into valley of Typee where cannibals capture them; Fayaway nurses hero
but he chooses to return to civilization),
Omoo A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (crew of Julia is imprisoned on
Tahiti; hero and fried Doctor Long Ghost are released and explore the island),
Mardi and a Voyage Thither (5 men sail through Mardi on King Media's boat; stop in
Vivenza [US]; Taji kills priest Aleema to rescue Yillah; Hautia seeks Taji; others include
philosopher Babbalanja, poet Yoomy, and historian Mohi),
Moby-Dick or the White Whale (monomaniacal Captain Ahab pursues Moby-Dick; others on the
Pequod include God-fearing Starbuck, Stubb, harpooners Queequeg, Daggoo, and
Tashtego, black Pip, and fire-worshipping Parsee; only narrator Ishmael survives),
Pierre or the Ambiguities (writer Pierre Glendinning leaves mom and fianc�e Lucy
Tartan for illegitimate sister, whom he comes to love; commits suicide in prison),
White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War (white jacket nearly drowns narrator when he falls
into water; Jack Chase appears on US Navy man-of-war; brutal floggings condemned)
Billy Budd Foretopman (Claggart falsely accuses Billy; Billy kills Claggart; Captain
Vere reluctantly hangs Billy),
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War,
Clarel A Poem and A Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (theological student Clarel loves Jew
Ruth while in Holy Land),
The Confidence-Man His Masquerade (Fidele MS River boat on April Fool's Day; no plot),
The Piazza Tales (short stories including The Bell Tower [artist Bannadonna rivals God],
The Lightning-Rod Man [man refuses to buy lightning-rod because he does not
control or fear God], The Enchanted Isles [sketches based on Galapagos Islands], Benito
Cerreno, Bartleby the Scrivener [Bartleby refuses to do his job proofreading legal
documents, is imprisoned, and starves]),
Edgar Allen Poe
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (stories including The Fall of the House of Usher
[narrator visits Roderick Usher; twin sister Madeline Usher emerges from burial vault;
house and family destroyed] and Berenice),
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (detective C. Auguste Dupin discovers a mother and
daughter were murdered by an "Ourang-Outang"),
The Pit and the Pendulum (victim of Spanish Inquisition escapes prison by falling into a
pit; rats save him from knife-swinging pendulum; rescued by opposing army),
The Purloined Letter (C. Auguste Dupin solves case of royal woman blackmailed by a
cabinet minister on the basis of a compromising letter),
The Raven (poet is startled by raven tapping at chamber door; raven perches on bust of
Pallas Athene and answers questions about dead lover "Nevermore"),
The Tell-Tale Heart (murderer hides body of victim under floor but hears a beating heart
and confesses),
Ulalume (narrator and his soul walk in woodland on Halloween following Venus and are
stopped by door of forgotten tomb of beloved Ulalume),
Annabel Lee,
The Bells,
The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (NE boy steals away on a whaler; drifts towards South
Pole in a canoe),
Ligeia (Ligeia dies and husband marries Rowena, who dies and turns into Ligeia),
The Golden Bug (Sullivan's Island SC: William Le Grand discovers cipher telling of
buried treasure, and drops beetle through one eye of a skull),
The Masque of the Red Death (castle masquerade ball during Plague years: Prince Prospero),
The City in the Sea
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (including When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, O
Captain My Captain [both about Abraham Lincoln's death], and Song of Myself ["a uniform
hieroglyphic" grass, "barbaric yawp", "look for me under your bootsoles", "origin of all poems",
reading it is "good health"]), Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas (alarmed at superficial US), Specimen
Days & Collect, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Song of the Open
Road
Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural Address
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among the Lowly (Vermonter plantation owner
Simon Legree beats slave Uncle Tom to death; Uncle Tom cared for owner Augustine St. Clare's
daughter Little Eva; others include mulatto Eliza, impish black child Topsy, Miss Ophelia St. Clare,
and slave catcher Marks)
George Washington Cable
Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes A Story of Creole Live (Frowenfeld learns of De Grapion vs. Grandissimes family feud; African king Bras Coupe tortured to death)
Joel Chandler Harris
Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (black servant tells white boy tales involving Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Tar Baby)
Francis Hopkinson Smith
Colonel Carter of Cartersville
Kate O'Flaherty Chopin
The Awakening
Sarah Orne Jewett
The Country of the Pointed Firs
Bret Harte
The Luck of the Roaring Camp (miners adopt Thomas Luck, son of dying prostitute Cherokee Sal, but he dies in Kentuck's arms in flood), The Outcast of Poker Flat
(gambler John Oakhurst, two prostitutes, and a drunkard sacrifice themselves in a blizzard to save young eloping couple)
Joaquin Miller
(poems)
James Whitcomb Riley
Little Orphan Annie, The Raggedy Man (boy admires farm hand)
Sidney Lanier
The Marshes of Glynn (sea marshes of Glynn County GA), The Revenge of Hamish
George Santayana
Sonnets and Other Verses, The Last Puritan (A Memoir in the Form of a Novel; Puritan Oliver Alden out of place in 1900s)
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Lyrics of a Lowly Life
Emily Dickinson
Poems (not famous until long after her death)
Josh Billings
Josh Billings His Sayings
Petroleum V. Nasby
The Nasby Papers
Artemus Ward
Artemus Ward His Book
Finley Peter Dunne
Mr. Dooley's Opinions
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
The Celbrated Jumping Fog of Calaveras County (Simon Wheeler narrators, Jim Smiley
bets his frog Dan'l Webster can outjump any; stranger pours quail shot in frog),
The Innocents Abroad (travel letters from Europe; burlesqued sentimental travel books),
Roughing It,
Life on the Mississippi (autobiographical; river loses its romance over 7 years),
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Tom Sawyer, cared for by Aunt Polly, and friend Huck
Finn witness murder by Injun Joe in cemetery but run away in fear to Jackson's Island;
they return to witness their funerals; Tom testifies at trial of falsely accused Muff Potter;
Tom and Becky Thatcher get lost in cave with Injun Joe but escape),
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (narrated by Huck, who escapes from drunken
father and journeys down Mississippi River with runaway slave Jim),
Pudd'nhead Wilson (lawyer David Wilson exposes that Roxy's mulatto son murdered his
uncle and accused Luigi),
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
Tom Sawyer Detective,
The Gilded Age,
The Mysterious Stranger (Satan disguised as Philip Traum disillusions boy in 1590
Eseldorf Austria),
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (stranger leaves sack of money [actually lead] in a
bank in Hadleyburg and sends letters to 19 telling them how to claim it),
The Prince and the Pauper (Edward VI and pauper Tom Canty switch places for several days),
1601 ("Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors")
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women (Meg mares tutor John Brooke; Beth likes music but dies young; fashionable Amy
marries Laurie; tomboyish and literary Jo marries German professor Mr. Bhaer),
Little Men (Meg and John Brooke have twins Daisy and Demi),
Jo's Boys (Jo and Mr. Bhaer turn their home into school for boys)
William Dean Howells
Criticism and Fiction,
A Modern Instance (Squire Gaylord tries to prevent Bartley Hubbard from divorcing his
daughter Marcia; Ben Halleck debates marrying divorced Marcia),
The Rise of Silas Lapham (Silas Lapham and wife Persis grow rich from Back Bay paint
mine on his farm and build home on Beacon Hill and try to acclimate to rich social scene;
daughter Penelope marries Tom Corey and goes to Mexico; family is financially ruined),
A Hazard of New Fortunes (Dryfoos moves to NY and makes son Conrad publisher of a
magazine; Basil March refuses to fire a socialist; Conrad is killed in a labor riot),
A Chance Acquaintance (Kitty Ellison loves Miles Arbuton as they travel on St.
Lawrence River but he ignores her),
A Traveller from Altruria (Aristides Homos likes utopia Altruria with democratic
Christian socialist government)
Deam Hamlin Garland
Main-Traveled Roads
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage (study of fear in US Civil War soldier Henry Fleming),
Maggie A Girl of the Streets (Maggie Johnson in NY slums is seduced by bartender Pete,
becomes a prostitute, and commits suicide),
The Open Boat (captain, cook, oiler, and correspondent escape sinking ship on small
boat; oiler dies as they come ashore),
The Black Riders and Other Lines,
War Is Kind (poems, including Do Not Weep Maiden for War Is Kind),
Whilomville Stores (stories set in Port Jervis NY; in Lynx-Hunting Jimmie Trescott
shoots a cow),
The Blue Hotel (Swede comes to Nebraska looking for romantic violence),
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (Sheriff Jack Potter, who has no gun, encounters
Scratchy Wilson)
Frank Norris
The Octopus (CA wheat farmers battle the railroad; love affair of Vanamee; The Pit
sequel), McTeague (McTeague prevented from practicing dentistry and murders wife Trina who
had won $5000 in a lottery; he kills Marcus Schouler but is handcuffed to the corpse and dies of
thirst in the desert)
Helen Hunt Jackson
A Century of Dishonor (US treatment of Indians), Ramona (Scottish-Indian Ramona elopes with Indian Alessandro)
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
In the Midst of Life (26 stories; young soldiers die), The Devil's Dictionary
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives
Jack London
The Sea Wolf (literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden is shipwrecked in SF Bay and
rescued by Wolf Larsen on the Ghost, who makes him work as cabin boy; Maude
Brewster also rescued; Ghost wrecks and blinded Larsen prevents its repair),
The Call of the Wild (dog Buck taken from CA to Klondike; kills lead dog Spitz; owner
John Thornton killed by Indians),
White Fang (wolf-dog White Fang is abused by first owner but rescued and tamed by
mining engineer Weedon Scott in CA; Fang defends Scott from convict),
Martin Eden
David Graham Phillips
Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise
Upton Sinclair
The Jungle (Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and wife Ono work in early 1900s Chicago stockyard)
Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie (country girl Carrie Meeber saved from cruel 1890s Chicago by salesman
Charles Drouet; George Hurstwood takes her to NY and she becomes actress but he
kills self),
Trilogy
The Financier (magnate Frank Cowperwood watches lobster devour a squid;
caught in stock crash and imprisoned; goes to Chicago to try again),
The Titan (Frank Cowperwood marries Aileen Butler and tries to gain monopoly
of utilities in Chicago; citizens foil plans and he goes to Europe with Berenice
Fleming, daughter of a Louisville madam),
The Stoic,
An American Tragedy (Clyde Griffiths seduces Roberta Alden but loves Sondra Finchly;
plans to murder Roberta but lacks the courage; fails to rescue Roberta when boat
overturns; charged with murder; based on story of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown 1906)
Henry James
The American (Christopher Newman, an unsophisticated American, loves Claire de
Bellegarde but opposed by aristocratic family; he decides not to reveal her mom and
brother murdered her father),
The Aspern Papers (former mistress of poet Jeffrey Aspern won't let his poems be published),
The Awkward Age (Nanda Brookenham and her mom love Vanderbank),
The Bostonians (post-Civil War Boston: Olive Chancellor, a radical feminist, and Basil
Ransom, a MS Confederate veteran, compete for Verena Tarrant; Miss Birdseye),
Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer marries Gilbert Osmond in Italy; Isabel becomes
disillusioned but stays to raise Pansy, daughter of Gilbert and Madame Merle),
The Wings of the Dove (Kate Croy loves English journalist Merton Densher but gets him
to marry dying friend Milly Theale to inherit her money; Densher cannot accept money or
promise he doesn't love memory of Milly so Kate leaves),
The Ambassadors (New England and France: Lambert Strether sent to Paris by fianc�e
Mrs. Newsome to get her son Chad who loves Madame de Vionnet),
The Golden Bowl (Prince Amerigo marries Maggie Verver but has affair with Maggie's
friend Charlotte Stant; Charlotte marries Maggie's dad Adam Verver),
The Turn of the Screw (governess, in love with employer, cares for orphans Miles and Flora, who
are under evil influence of the ghosts of Peter Quint, ex-stewart, and Miss Jessel,
ex-governess),
Roderick Hudson (American sculptor Roderick Hudson, who loves Christina Light, goes
to Rome and becomes disillusioned),
The Princess of Casamassima (Princess Casamassima, formerly Christiana Light, studies
poverty in London and meets radical Hyacinth Robinson),
The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories (Clement Searle goes to England to claim rich
estate but dies),
The Spoils of Pynton (Owen Gereth refuses to marry Fleda Vetch so his mom removes
art treasures from his house; he marries Mona Brigstock and offers Fleda art but house
burns down),
What Maisie Knew (12-year-old Maisie Farange spends 6 months with each of divorced
parents, each of whom are remarried and having affairs again),
Notes on Novelists,
The Sacred Fount (older partner is refreshed and younger depleted in marriage),
The Art of the Novel,
Daisy Miller (narrator Frederick Winterbourne regrets rigid adherence to European
conventions when Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever),
The Europeans (artist Felix Young and his sister Baroness Munster visit relatives the
Wentworths in Boston)
WEB Du Bois
Souls of Black Folk, The Quest for the Silver Fleece
Frank J. Webb
The Garies and Their Friends
Sutton Griggs
Imperium in Imperio
Charles Chesnutt
The Conjure Woman, The Marrow of a Tradition
James Parton
biographies of Greeley, Jefferson, and others
George Bancroft
History of the United States
William Hickling Prescott
History of the Conquest of Mexico
Henry Brooks Adams
History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, The Education of Henry Adams
Henry George
(economist) Progress and Poverty
Edward Bellamy
Looking Backward 2000-1887
Henry Charles Corey
(economist) Past Present and Future
Lester Frank Ward
Dynamic Sociology
William James
The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth (orphan Lily Bart loves Lawrence Seldon but reject him
because he is poor; blackmailed and falsely accused by other men; becomes
milliner and takes overdose of sleeping pills),
The Age of Innocence (NY 1870s: Neland Archer marries May Welland but
loves her cousin Ellen Olenska),
Ethan Frome (MA farm: farmer Ethan Frome marries whining hypochondriac
Zeena but loves her cousin Mattie; Ethan and Mattie injured in bobsled suicide
attempt; Zeena becomes devoted nurse and Mattie becomes nag),
The Custom of the Country (Undine Spragg samples pleasures, marries
millionaire from hometown),
Old New York (4 novellas about 1840 to 1880, including False Dawn [Lewis
Raycie buys modern pictures], The Old Maid [Charlotte Lovell's cousin raises
her illegitimate daughter Tina], The Spark [Walt Whitman influences old man],
New Year's Day [wife sacrifices for sick husband])
Willa Cather
A Lost Lady (Marian Forrester's pioneer husband dies and she becomes mistress of Ivy
Peters; Niel Herbert adores her; she disappears to South America),
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant
establish diocese in NM),
My Antonia (Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda works on farms after
father's suicide, elopes with railway conductor, and marries farmer Anton
Cuzak; others include lawyer Jim Burden),
O Pioneers (Alexandra Bergson takes over NE farm when dad dies; brother Emil
killed; marries Carl Linstrum),
One of Ours (Claude Wheeler grows up on Western farm, goes to college, killed
in army in France),
The Song of the Lark (Coloradoan Thea Kronborg, daughter of Swedish
clergyman, goes to Chicago, has affair with Fred Ottenburg, and becomes
soprano at Met. Opera House in NY),
Alexander's Bridge,
Youth and the Bright Medusa (stories, including Paul's Case)
Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg Ohio (23 stories; reporter George Willard develops),
Dark Laughter, The Triumph of the Egg (chicken farmer is unable to perform simple trick
with an egg)
Sinclair Lewis (first American to win Nobel Prize)
Main Street (Carol Kennicott tires of physician husband Will and tries to bring
culture to dull Gopher Praire, MN [based on Sauk Centre]),
Dodsworth,
Arrowsmith (Martin Arrowsmith, a bacteriologist, goes to VT farm and West Indies),
Babbit (Zenith, the Zip City: George F. Babbitt, real estate broker, fears
ostracism but encourages son Tom to rebel),
Elmer Gantry (Kansas City: ex-football player Elmer Gantry becomes popular
but hypocritical minister)
It Can't Happen Here (Berzelius Windrip sets up fascist dictatorship in US;
Doremus Jessup and Walt Trowbridge in Canada oppose him)
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises (Lost Generation 1925 France: journalist Jake Barnes narrates;
Lady Brett Ashley is divorcing and may love Jake but plans to marry Michael
Campbell and has affair with Spanish bullfighter Pedro Romero in Pamplona;
others include Greek Bill Gorton and American-Jewish writer Robert Cohn),
A Farewell to Arms (WWI ambulance driver Lt. Frederic Henry loves English
nurse Catherine Barkley, who becomes pregnant; Henry deserts after Caporetto
in Italy and they go to Switzerland, where she dies),
In Our Time (short stories about Nick Adams, including Indian Camp and Big
Two-Hearted River),
Men Without Women (short stories including The Killers [Nick Adams warns
Ole Andreson that two hired gunmen from city are coming to kill him], The
Undefeated, Fifty Grand, Hills Like White Elephants, A Simple Inquiry),
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spanish Civil War: American professor Robert Jordan
assigned by Pablo and Pilar to blow up a bridge; Jordan loves Maria for three
days; Jordan carries out mission but is left to die; title from Donne's Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions),
The Old Man and the Sea (Cuban fisherman Santiago catches marlin on 85th day
but it is slowly eaten by sharks on way home),
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (English guide Wilson saves
Macombers from lion on African safari; next day Macomber fights wild buffalo
but wife shoots him),
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (writer Harry goes on African safari to "work fat off
his mind" but gets gangrene, sees vision of a frozen leopard, and dies),
To Have and Have Not (Harry Morgan smuggles Chinese and liquor in Key
West during Depression and is shot)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby (Jazz Age Long Island: Jay Gatsby loves Daisy
Buchanan, cousin of narrator Nick Carraway, but she stays with husband Tom;
Daisy runs over Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson and Tom shoots Jay),
Tender Is the Night (wealthy schizophrenic Nicole Warren marries her
psychiatrist Dick Diver; she becomes mentally stable but he deteriorates; she
leaves him for a lover),
This Side of Paradise (spoiled Middle Westerner Amory Blaine goes to
Princeton and joins literary cults; loves Rosaline Commase but is rejected;
serves in WWI; starts career in advertising)
Stephen Vincent Benet
The Devil and Daniel Webster (NE farmer Jabez Stone sells his soul to the devil but is saved by Webster's oratory before demonic jury, John Brown's
Body (Civil War narrative beginning with Harper's Ferry), Western Star
John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men (strong giant half-wit migrant worker Lennie accidentally kills woman
who seduces him and is shot by friend George to protect him from lynch mob),
The Grapes of Wrath (Joad family travels from OK to CA during the Great
Depression to find work picking fruit; Tom Joad becomes involved in strikes and
kills a man; Rose of Sharon has baby),
Travels with Charlie,
In Dubious Battle (Communist Mac's friend Jim Nolan murdered; Doc Burton
helps striking CA fruit pickers),
East of Eden (Salinas Valley: Adam Trask and Cathy have two sons; Cal kills
Aron by telling him mom is a prostitute),
Tortilla Flat (carefree Danny meets with simple friends Pablo, Big Joe Portagee,
Jesus Maria Corcoran, and Pirate in his home, "like the Round Table"),
The Pearl (CA Indian pearl-fisher and wife Juana's baby bitten by scorpion; they
pay doctor with large pearl)
John Dos Passos
USA Trilogy (panoramic picture of US life from just before WWI to Great
Depression; The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money; consists of
"newsreels," "camera eyes," and biographies),
Manhattan Transfer (NYC: journalist Jimmy Herf and actress wife Ellen Thatcher
divorce; Bud Korpenning commits suicide; gambler Joe Harland
becomes beggar),
Three Soldiers (3 American WWI soldiers: Italian Dan Fuselli, Indianan
Chrisfield, musician John Andrews)
Thomas Clayton Wolfe
Look Homeward Angel (describes youth of Eugene Gant in Altamont, Catawba
[based on Asheville, NC]; Eugene attends mother's boarding house, has
romance, and goes to college; brother Ben Gant dies at St.Louis World's Fair),
Of Time and the River (Eugene Gant studies drama at Harvard under James
Hatcher; dad dies; tours France; teaches literature in NYC),
The Web and the Rock (George Webber goes to "Enfabled Rock" of NY and
has affair with scenic designer Mrs. Esther Jack but he breaks from her web
of devotion to NY to seek stability),
You Can't Go Home Again (George Webber returns from Germany, resumes
affair with Esther Jack, becomes writer, and is disillusioned by hometown)
William Faulkner
Soldiers' Pay,
The Reivers,
Sanctuary (Popeye rapes Temple Drake with corn cob and takes her to a
Memphis brothel, but she protest him and testifies against Lee Goodwin,
defended by Horace Benbow, and Goodwin is lynched),
The Sound and the Fury (4 sections narrated by Compson family: idiot Benjy;
Harvard student Quentin, whose ties with sister Caddy shattered by her
loveless marriage; Jason, who keeps money Caddy sends to support daughter
Quentin; black cook Dilsey),
The Hamlet - The Town - The Mansion trilogy (Flem Snopes becomes part
owner of Will Varner's store in Frenchman's Bend and marries his daughter
Eula; becomes VP of bank in Jefferson and drives president Manfred De Spain
from town; Gavin Stevens loves Eula and her daughter Linda),
Go Down Moses (series of stories about McCaslin family in Yoknapatawpha
County, including Was, The Fire and the Hearth, Pantaloon in Black, and The
Bear [hunt for Big Ben]),
Light in August (part-black Joe Christmas employed by Joe Brown has affair
with Joanna Burden and kills her; Christmas is killed by mob; pregnant Lena
Grove comes to Jefferson looking for her lover; Revereand Gail Hightower loses
his church because of devotion to the past),
Absalom Absalom (Thomas Sutpen elected colonel in Jefferson MS's Civil War
regiment; daughter Judith's lover Charles Bon killed by Sutpen's son),
As I Lay Dying (husband Anse and kids Cash, Darl, Jewel, Vardaman, and
Dewey Dell carry body of Addie Bundren to Jefferson MS),
A Fable (allegory of Jesus in WWI France),
Knight's Gambit (stories involving Detective Gavin Stevens, including Monk),
Requiem for a Nun (Temple Drake marries Gowan Stevens; Pete blackmails her; black
servant Nancy Manningoe kills her youngest child, but Temple also is responsible),
Intruder in the Dust (Chick Mallison, Aleck Sander, and Miss Eunice
Habersham prove innocence of non-servile black Lucas Beuchamp),
Sartoris (Col. John Sartoris's descendant Bayard returns from WWI guilty about
brother John's death; grandfather dies of heart attack in car; Bayard marries
Horace Benbow's sister Narcissa; Bayard dies as Ohio test pilot),
The Unvanquished (7 stories about Sartoris family during Civil War; adventures
of Bayard Sartoris and black companion Ringo),
These Thirteen (short stories including A Rose for Emily [Southern spinster
Emily Grierson locks Yankee construction worker Homer Barron, who courted
her, in upstairs bedroom, where he dies])
E. E. Cummings
The Enormous Room (WWI French concentration camp where Cummings was imprisoned on false treason charge)
Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead (Lt. Robert Hearn's infantry platoon invade
Japanese island in Pacific in WWII),
The Executioner's Song,
An American Dream (Stephen Rojack),
Armies of the Night ("History as a Novel, the Novel as History" from Dover
Beach; anti-Vietnam march on Pentagon)
Jame Michener
Tales of the South Pacific
John Hersey
A Bell for Adano, Hiroshima (tells of nuclear bombing throught the eyes of six people, including priest, minister, and two doctors)
JD Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield runs away from his prep school and drifts about NY), Franny and Zooey (college student Franny Glass and actor brother Zooey feel alienated)
Joseph Heller
Catch-22 (Pianosa Island during WWII: Yossarian can only stop bombing
missions if insane but wanting to stop is sane), Something Happened, Good as Gold
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance with
Death (optometrist Billy Pilgrim survives Dresden firebombing and returns to Illium NY;
kidnapped by aliens from Talfamadore who teach about 4D world), Cat's Cradle, Player Piano
Robert Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land (a Martian)
John Barth
Giles Goat-Boy The New Revised Syllabus (computer WESAC's developer
Max Spielman designates George Giles, who had been raised by goats and opposed by
poet Harold Bray, as Our Great Tutor; Giles's teachings are edited by WESAC, the
academician JB, and a publisher), The Sot-Weed Factor (Ebenezer Cooke
comes from England to take charge of MD tobacco plantation Malden)
Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men (US South: Willie Stark, like Huey Long;
narrated by Jack Burden)
O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)
The Four Million (title from NYC population; 25
stories including An Unfinished Story and The Gift of the Magi [poor man sells watch
to buy combs for wife, who sells hair to buy watch fob for him]), The Last Leaf (ill girl
decides to die when last of five leaves outside her window falls but one hangs) , A
Retrieved Restoration (Jimmy Valentine tries to reform but foiled when he opens a safe
during an emergency)
John Cheever
The Wapshot Chronicle, Falconer
John Updike
Rabbit Run (salesman Harry Angstrom leaves alcoholic wife Janice and
child to find freedom but returns), Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest
Ezra Pound
Pipostes, Cantos (ancient Greece, 1800s US, Renaissance Italy; Pisan Cantos written when arrested for pro-Fascist Italian radio broadcasts, awarded Bollingen
Prize; Section Rock-Drill), Personae ("masks of the actor")
Winston Churchill
The Crisis (Stephen Brice and Virginia Carvel in St. Louis), Richard Carvel (hero rescued by John Paul Jones in American Revolution)
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Town Down the River, Miniver Cheevey, Richard
Cory, The Man Against the Sky
Robert Frost
North of Boston, Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening, The Road Not
Taken (takes the one less traveled and "that has made all the difference"), The Gift
Outright, Fire and Ice, Mending Wall (narrator's neighbor says "good fences make good
neighbors"), A Boy's Will, Birches, The Death of the Hired Man (farmer and wife debate
keeping returned hired man), A Further Range (including Ten Mills and Build Soil)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ballad of the Harp Weaver, A Few Figs from Thistles
William Carlos Williams
(NJ pediatrician) Paterson (Passaic River, NJ: mythical
Paterson wanders about his environs and reflect on history of the locale and
contemporary scene), In the American Grain (study of Columbus, Cortez, De Soto,
Raleigh, Franklin, and others)
Ray Bradbury
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles
James Agee
Death in the Family, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (about AL farmers in the Depression, with photographer Walker Evans)
Zane Grey
Riders of the Purple Sage, The Last of the Plainsmen, Tales of Fishing
N. Scott Momaday
(American Indian) The House Made of Dawn
Archibald MacLeich
Collected Poems, The Pot of Earth (fertility rite)
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead (architect Howard Roark, possibly based on Frank Lloyd
Wright, turns down commissions rather than sacrifice integrity), Atlas Shrugged (railroad
worker Dagny Taggart finds government-free utopia at Gat's Gulch, CO)
Nathaniel West
Miss Lonelyhearts (love advice columnist murdered), The Day of the Locust (Hollywood painter Tod loves starlet; paints "The Burning of Los Angeles")
Robert and Helen Lynd
Middletown (Muncie IN)
Lillian Hellman
The Children's Hour (lesbian teachers), The Little Foxes (story of Hubbard family condemns new industrial Southerners), Watch on the Rhine (German
refugee kills informer at German embassy in US)
John Phillips Marquand
The Late George Apley (A Novel in the Form of a Memoir;
Horatio Willing tells about life of Bostonian George Apley), Wickford Point (upper-class
family near Boston declines)
Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March (Chicago 1930s: Augie March refuses
settled life; brother Simon March marries rich),
Herzog (Prof. Moses Herzog, at his MA summer home, writes letters about ex-
wife Madeleine and ex-friend; brought to senses by semicomic misadventures),
Humboldt's Gift (Charles Citrine falls under spell of Von Humboldt Fleisher and
Rinaldo Cantabile; debates isolated life of art)
Bernard Malamud
The Assistant, Idiots First, The Fixer, The Natural
Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Magician of Lublin
Philip Roth
Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint (Alexander Portnoy resents
expectations and sacrifice of domineering mother Sophie Portnoy), Zuckerman Bound,
American Pastoral
Claude McKay
Home to Harlem, Banjo
Countee Cullen
Color, The Ballad of the Brown Girl
Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues (Jesse B Simple)
Jean Toomer
Cane
Richard Wright
Native Son (Bigger Thomas, from Chicago slums, is victimized for
being black, commits two murders, is defended by a Communist lawyer, and sentenced
to death), Black Boy
James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain, Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country (study of love among blacks and whites in NYC)
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man (narrator-hero searches for identity in South and in Harlem)
Alice Walker
The Color Purple (Celie made pregnant twice by dad by age 14 and sold to Albert but befriends Shug), Meridian
Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved (Sethe kills her daughter Beloved rather than have her grow up a slave)
Maya Angelou
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Die, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Carson McCullers
The Member of the Wedding (Frankie Addams wants to accompany
her brother on his honeymoon; cousin John Henry gets sick; black cook
Berenice Sadie Brown),
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (eccentric tomboy Mick Kelly, goodhearted Biff
Brannon, drunken Jake Blount, and black intellectual Dr. Benedict Copeland
admire deaf mute Singer, who commits suicide),
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (Amelia Evans rejects her husband Marvin Macy
and turns her general store into a cafe when her cousin Lymon comes; 6 years
later Lymon loves Marvin and they torment)
Truman Capote
Other Voices Other Rooms (Joel Knox meets Randolph, Jesus Fever, and dad at Skully's Landing and achieves self-awareness at Cloud Hotel), In Cold Blood,
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Eudora Welty
The Ponder Heart, The Optimist's Daughter, The Wide Net, The Delta Wedding
Flannery O'Connor
The Violent Bear It Away
Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology (deceased people from Spoon River narrate biographies from cemetery)
Carl Sandburg
Chicago Poems, Abraham Lincoln (The Prairie Years, The War Years), The People Yes, Rootabaga Stories
Vachel Lindsay
The Congo, The Santa Fe Trail A Humoresque (contrasts industrial civilization with Rachel-Jane bird)
Jack Kerouac
On the Road (Sal Paradise [Kerouac] hitch-hikes across US with Carlo Marx [Ginsberg] and Dean Moriarity [Cassady]),
Allen Ginsberg
Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems (elegy for mom Naomi)
Lawrence Ferlingheti
Pictures from the World Gone Wild
William Burroughs
The Naked Lunch
Edward Albee
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (history professor George and wife
Martha invite new instructor and barren wife for a drink; all get drunk and become
sadistic), Seascape, Tiny Alice, Three Tall Women, The Zoo Story (bum Jerry accosts
Peter in Central Park and stabs himself)
Maxwell Anderson
Winterset (based on Saccho and Vanzetti; Mio, whose Italian radical father was executed for murder he didn't commit, loves Miriamne; both killed by
gangsters), Gods of the Lightning, Night Over Taos, What Price Glory? (written with
Laurence Stallings; Capt. Flag and Sgt. Quirt compete for French girl in WWI)
Georges Kaufman
You Can't Take It with You (written with Moss Hart; happy but bizarre NY Vanderhof family), Of Thee I Sing (Presidential candidate John Wintergreen
campaigns on love platform and marries Atlantic City beauty contest winner)
Arthur Ashur Miller
The Crucible (1692 Salem: John and Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail
Williams accuses Elizabeth of witchcraft, Mary Warren also makes accusations, Giles
Corey), Death of a Salesman (salesman Willy Loman considers himself a failure and
commits suicide; other characters include wife Linda and sons Biff and Happy)
Eugene O'Neill
Ah, Wilderness (July 4 1906: adolescent Tommy Miller in adult world)
All God's Chillun Got Wings (Ella Downey marries lawyer Jim Harris, becomes
racist to feel superior)
Anna Chrisitie (Christopher Christopherson, a Swedish-American barge
captain, sends daughter Anna Chrisite to St. Paul where she becomes a
prostitute; she loves Mat Burke),
Beyond the Horizon (brothers Robert and Andrew Mayo love same woman),
Desire Under the Elms (elderly father Ephraim Cabot marries Abbie, who
seduces his son Eban),
Emperor Jones (Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter, sets himself up as a
West Indian island dictator but is killed in revolt),
The Great God Brown (successful businessman takes the mask of artist Dion Anthony),
The Iceman Cometh (NYC: salesman Theodore Hickman in End of the Line
Caf� bar tells about killing his wife),
Lazarus Laughed (Lazarus preaches new religion of laughter after being raised
by Jesus; Caligula stabs Lazarus),
Long Day's Journey Into Night (autobiographical story of actor Edmund Tyrone
and family, including drunk son and servant Cathlen),
Marco Millions (Kublai Khan's daughter loves Marco Polo but he only wants money),
A Moon for the Misbegotten (unfulfilled love of alcoholic and farm woman),
Mourning Becomes Electra (trilogy based on Oresteia by Aeschylus, set in post
Civil War NE; General Ezra Mannon's [ Agamemnon] wife Christine
[Clytemnestra] has affair with Adam Brant [Aegisthus], and daughter Lavinia
[Electra] persuades her brother Orin [Orestes] to shoot him),
Strange Interlude (Nina Leeds' fianc�e dies in WWI; she marries Sam Evans but
aborts their child but has baby from affair with Dr. Darrell),
The Hairy Ape (ship stoker Yank rejected by IWW and crushed by gorilla at NYC zoo)
Tony Kushner
Angels in America
William Saroyan
The Human Comedy, The Time of Your Life (lovable eccentrics and Detective Blick of the Vice Squad meet in waterfront saloon)
Robert Sherwood
Idiot's Delight, Road to Rome, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, The Petrified Forest (Alan Squier, hitchhiking NE author, gets gangster to kill him so his insurance money can save lunchroom owner's daughter), There Shall Be No Night
Neil Simon
Biloxi Blues, Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Broadway Bound, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Lost in Yonkers
Thornton Wilder
Our Town (Grover's Corners, NH: Stage Manager talks to audience; Professor
Willard and Editor Webb commend on daily life; Webb's daughter Emily
marries George Gibbs; Emily dies in childbirth),
The Skin of Our Teeth (George Antrobus, his family, and temptress maid Sabina
survive world upheavals throughout history, including Ice Age, Deluge,
and WWII),
The Matchmaker,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1714 Peru: Brother Juniper investigates death of 5
travelers on bridge),
Theophilus North
Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Big Daddy Pollitt is dying of cancer on MS Delta; son Gooper
wants inheritance; other son Brick accuses his wife Maggie of causing his
friend's death; Maggie says she is pregnant to help Brick get inheritance),
The Glass Menagerie (St. Louis: Tom Wingfield narrates; mother Amanda asks
Tom to bring a gentleman caller for crippled sister Laura, who has withdrawn to
private universe of her glass animals; Laura temporarily emerges into real world
when the horn of the glass unicorn breaks),
A Streetcar Named Desire (New Orleans: faded belle Blanche DuBois comes to live with
sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski, who warns a friend not to marry
Blanche and then rapes her; streetcars Desire and Cemetery run on same track),
The Rose Tattoo (dressmaker Serafina Delle Rose's truckdriver husband is killed; 3 years
later she marries truckdriver with tattoo on chest like husband did)
Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove
John Grisham
The Firm, The Client, The Chamber, The Testament
Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Rising Sun, Sphere
Tom Clancy
Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger
Stephen King
The Shining, The Stand, Insomnia
James Thomas Farrell
Studs Lonigan (trilogy: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day; Studs Lonigan, son of Irish Catholics in Chicago, has affair with Iris, loves Lucy Scanlan, and works as house painter; friend Wery
Reilley rapes Irene at party; Studs becomes unemployed and has affair with Catherine Banahan)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes
Shirley Jackson
The Lottery (winner is stoned)
James Jones
From Here to Eternity (story of life in US army before Pearl Harbor; title from Kipling's Gentlemen Rankers)
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita (Humbert Humbert loves 12-year-old Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita, and marries her mom Charlotte, who dies; Lolita seduces him but marries Clare Quilty, whom Humbert murders), Pale Fire (Charles Kinbote, who imagines himself king of Zembla, edits murdered John Shade's poem; 999 lines)
L Frank Baum
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Alex Haley
Roots (many generations of slaves from Gambia, including Kunta Kinte)
Malcolm Little and Alex Haley
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Pearl Buck
The House of Earth Trilogy including The Good Earth (China: Wang Lung
and wife O-lan rise from poverty to wealth but sons don't share their respect for the land),
Erskine Caldwell
Tobacco Road (Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and sickly wife Ada have 3 kids; Jeeter's widowed preacher sister Bessie Rice gets Jeeter's son Dude to marry her by buying him a car, which he crashes, killing his grandmother; daughter Pearl married at 12 to railroad worker Lov Bensey, who then lives with other daughter Ellie May; Jeeter and Ada die in shack fire), God's Little Acre (protagonist shifts location of acre on his farm dedicated to the church)
Edward Hale
The Man Without a Country
Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (private eye Sam Spade investigates theft of jewel-encrusted Maltese Falcon of Knights Templar; hard-boiled fiction), The Thin Man
John Knowles
A Separate Peace (NE prep school: narrator Gene Forrester and good student Brinker each cause adventurous Phineas to fall, and he dies)
Walter Clark
The Ox-Bow Incident (three alleged cattle rustlers are lynched just as news comes that they are innocent)
DuBose Heyward
Porgy (crippled black beggar Porgy becomes involved in murder in Catfish Row, Charleston; others include Bes, Sportin' Life, Crown, and Serena)
Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (mental hospital patient Randle Patrick McMurphy stages guerilla warfare against evil nurse Miss Ratched)
Margaret Mitchell
Gone With the Wind (Civil War Georgia: Scarlett O'Hara of Tara plantation loves Ashley Wilkes but he marries Melanie Hamilton; Scarlett is widowed twice, then marries Rhett Butler; Alexandra Ripley wrote 1992 sequel Scarlett)
Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Normal Hall
Mutiny on the Bounty (Roger Byam narrates mutiny of Fletcher Christian against Capt. William Bligh on the HMS Bounty in 1789; sequels Men against the Sea and Pitcairn's Island)
Katherine Anne Porter
Ship of Fools (German ship sails from Veracruz to Bremerhaven 1931), Pale Horse Pale Rider (3 novels including Pale Horse Pale Rider [WWI soldier and
Southern journalist have affair during influenza epidemic], Noon Wine [farmer Mr. Thompson kills stranger], and Old Mortality)
Marjorie Kenneth Rawlings
The Yearling (northern Florida boy Jody loves a fawn but must shoot it when it eats family corn)
Lew Wallace
Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ (Judah Ben-Hur falsely accused by Messala, whom he defeats in chariot race)
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird (AL town: lawyer Atticus Finch defends a black man; his daughter Scout Finch narrates)
John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces
Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club
Betty Frieden
The Feminine Mystique
Ellen Glasgow
In This Our Life, Barren Ground, Vein of Iron
Jerzy Kosinski
The Painted Bird (autobiographical story of Polish boy in WWII)
Grace Metalious
Peyton Place (vice and crime in NE town)
William Henry Hudson
Green Mansions (Mr. Abel tells of his affair with bird girl
Rima, killed by savages, in South America)
Gertrude Stein
Three Lives (The Good Anna [kindly German servant], Melanctha [uneducated black girl], The Gentle Lena [dumb German maid]), Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (her secretary), Four Saints in Three Acts (opera by Virgil Thomson with all-black cast), The Making of Americans (autobiographical Martha Hersland)
John James O'Hara
Appointment in Samarra
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Arna Bontemps
God Sends Sundays, Black Thunder
Irwin Shaw
The Young Lions
Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer (young poet reaches peak of creative powers)
Edna Ferber
Show Boat (MS showboat owner Captain Andy Hawks marries NE teacher Parthy Ann; actress daughter Magnolia marries Gaylord Ravenal; daughter Kim becomes Broadway star)
Thomas Heggen
Mr. Roberts
Joyce Carol Oats
A Garden of Earthly Delights, Bellefleur, Mysteries of Winterthurn
Anne Tyler
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Gloria Naylor
The Woman of Brewster Place
Harriot Monroe
edited Poetry: A Magazine of Verse
Amy Lowell
Men Women and Ghosts, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
Wallace Stevens
Peter Quince at the Clavier (Susanna in the Apocrypha), Sunday Morning, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, The Necessary Angel
Robert Lowell
Life Studies (confessional; travel poems, childhood, tributes to Crane Schwartz Sntayana and Ford, family portraits)
Raymond Chandler
Farewell My Lovely (Los Angeles: Philip Marlowe searches for missing woman and serves as bodyguard for man looking for a stolen necklace)
Hamlin Garland
Main-Travelled Roads (stories about Iowa and Dakota farmers, includes Under the Lion's Paw), A Son of the Middle Border (autobiography)
Robinson Jeffers
Roan Stallion, Tamar (Monterey coast girl based on King David's daughter), The Tower Beyond Tragedy (based on Agamemnon), Thurso's Landing
Sylvia Plath
(committed suicide) Ariel (love songs to death; dehumanize people as mannequins and paper figures), The Bell Jar (schoolgirl prodigy Esther Greenwood has mental breakdowns)
Anne Sexton
Live or Die, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, The Death Notebooks
John Ashbery
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Leo Rosten
The Education of Hym*a*n K*a*p*laa Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*pla*n, The Joys of Yiddish
Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Rainbow (bureaucracies use WWII to gain power), The Crying of Lot 49
Charles and Mary Beard
The Rise of American Civilization, America in Midpassage
Seymour Hersh
My Lai 4
Arthur Schleinger
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, New
Viewpoints in American History, The Rise of the City, Prelude to Independence The Newspaper War in Boston
Arthur Schleinger Jr
The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt, A Thousand Days (JFK)
Tom Wolfe
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Our Time
Booth Tarkington
Seventeen (William Baxter [Silly Billy] loves Lola Pratt, who talks to dog Flopit), Alice Adams (drug company employee has nagging wife, shiftless son, and dreaming daughter Alice whose hopes are dashed and enters Frincke's Business College), Penrod (Midwest 12-year old Penrod Schofield), The Magnificent Ambersons
Herman Wouk
The Caine Mutiny (officers on WWII minesweeper mutiny against Captain Queeg), War and Remembrances, The Winds of War
Henry Roth
Call It Sleep (Jewish boy grows up in Lower East Side)
Unknown Old English
Beowulf (Denmark: Beowulf, a Geat, rescues King Hrothgar and the Danes from Grendel and
his mother at Heorot in Zealand with sword Hrunting; fire-breathing dragon later kills Beowulf)
Caedmon
(poems)
Cynewulf
Dream of the Road, Christ, Exeter Book
Unknown Old English
The Wanderer, The Seafarer
Bede
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Alfred
translated Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae
Unknown Gaelic
Ulster Cycle (sagas about Deirdre [daughter of King Conchobar's storyteller Felim destined to be beautiful and bring death; she is raised by Lavarcham in woods; falls in love with Conchobar's nephew Naisi and flees to Alba with his brothers; they are persuaded to return and Usnech's sons are killed and Deirdre commits suicide], Cu Chulainn [son of sun god Lugh, Cu Chulainn kills hound but takes its place until owner gets new one; trained by woman warrior Scathach; subdues Aoife and has son Conlaoch by her; Conlaoch returns later and kills many but is killed by Cu; Cu fights army of Queen Maeve; seduced by sea god Mananaan's wife Fand; Queen Medb of Cruachain creates imaginary host whom Cu fights to exhaustion and dies tied to pillar; wife Emer dies with him], King Conchobar, Medb and Ailill, Fergus, Cu Roi, Finnabair, Noisi, Emer, Bricriu Poison-tongue, Cathbad the Druid, Etain, Da Derga, Mac Datho, Conaire, and Conall Cernach; includes tale Cattle-Raid of Cooley [Cu Chulainn deters army of Queen Maeve while Red Branch warriors of Ulster awaken; duels and kills foster brother Ferdiad])
William the Conqueror
Domesday Book (census)
William Langland
Piers Plowman (poet dreams in Malvern Hills about tower of Truth and dungeon of Wrong; Holy Church explains visions; Conscience persuades many to leave Seven
Deadly Sins for St. Truth, and plowman Piers serves as guide for those who will help plow his half acre; like Dante's Divine Comedy)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Troilus and Criseyde (Trojan prince Troilus pursues Cressida during Trojan War
truce; Pandarus helps them get together; her dad exchanges her for a Trojan prisoner;
Diomedes brings her to Greek camp and she is unfaithful, as Troilus's sister Cassandra
predicted; Troilus sees Diomedes with brooch he gave Criseyde and fights him in battle
but is killed by Achilles)
House of Fame (finds engraving of Dido and Aeneas in Venus's Temple, lady Fame
distributes fame and slander arbitrarily; unfinished),
The Legend of Good Women (Queen Alceste has Chaucer write about 20 women who
suffered or died because they were faithful in love, including Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido,
Medea, Ariadne, and Philomela),
The Book of the Duchess (elegy on death of John of Gaunt's wife Blanche of Lancaster,
Halcyon and Ceyx story),
The Parliament of Fowls (Scipio Africanus appears to younger Scipio in dream; on
Valentine's Day 3 fowls fight over formel eagle),
Canterbury Tales (Tabard Inn in Southwark, pilgrimage to St. Thomas a Becket shrine in
Canterbury: tales told by
Prioress [schoolboy sings hymn about Mary in Jewish ghetto and has throat cut
but is saved by Mary, who commands him to sing until a grain is removed from
his tongue],
Monk [17 8-line tragedies including Bernabo of Milan, Ugolino, Pedro of Spain,
Pedro of Cyprus, Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Heracles, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar,
Zonobia, Nero, Holofernes, Antiochus, Alexander, Caesar, and Croesus],
Friar [Summoner and Devil swear friendship],
Knight [Theseus defeats Creon at Thebes; Arcite dies after winning tournament
for the hand of Hippolyta's sister Emily and his cousin Palamon marries her],
Melibee [Melibee forgives 3 enemies who beat his wife Prudence and killed his
daughter Sophie],
Miller [carpenter John's wife Alison scorns Absolon but loves Nicholas, who
convinces John to suspend three tubs in the attic in preparation for a second
Flood; Absolon brands Nicholas's rump],
Man of Law [mom of Sultan of Syria puts Constance adrift; washed ashore in
Northumberland and marries King Alla],
Wife of Bath [used tricks to keep first 4 husbands in hand; married 5th for love,
but after a fight he let her run everything; foul witch tells Arthur's knight what
women most desire is sovereignty over husbands and makes him marry her; he
gives her choice of beauty or fidelity and gets both],
Physician [Virginia killed by judge father, whom Apius condemns to hanging
but people revolt and the judge commits suicide],
Pardoner [3 revelers want to slay Death, who killed their friend with plague; find
treasure under tree; stab and poison each other over the gold],
Nun's Priest [fox Don Russell seizes rooster Chauntecleer, as he had dreamed,
but had been mocked by wife Pertelote],
Parson [description of Confession, 7 Deadly Sins, and Penitence; Chaucer's Retractions],
Reeve [miller Simkin steals grain from scholars John and Alan, who spend the
night at his house and sleep with his wife and daughter],
Manciple [archer Phebus's white crow tells him his wife had affair; he kills her
but then turns against the tattle-tale crow],
Merchant [knight January's sight restored but his wife May has affair with Damyan],
Second Nun [Cecilia converts husband Valerian and his brother Tiburtius; Almachius
tries to make them sacrifice to Jupiter but they refuse and are executed],
Shipman [monk John spends night with merchant's wife; John gets loan from merchant],
Squire [knight brings gifts on birthday of Tartar king Cambuscan; Cambuscan's
daughter Canacee wears ring that lets her talk to a falcon],
Canon's Yeoman [describes futility of alchemy],
Clerk [Marquis Walter marries Griselda and tests her loyalty],
Roger the Cook [apprentice Perkin likes dice and women],
Franklin [Aurelius removes all rocks from British coast to win Arveragus's wife Dorigen])
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Historia regum Britanniae (includes stories of Brute, great-grandson of Aeneas, King Lear, Cymbeline, and Arthur)
Unknown Middle English
The Tale of Gamelyn (Gamelyn robbed of inheritance by older brother but leads band
of outlaws in the forest and overthrows him)
Thomas Malory
Le Morte d'Arthur (Arthurian Legend - Camelot: King Arthur [based on 6th
century Celtic king, becomes king by pulling sword Excaliber from stone, dies on island of Avalon],
Queen Guinevere [Arthur's wife], Lancelot [great knight, loved Guinevere], Percival [commits many
gaucheries when first at Arthur's court but trained as knight and granted sight of Holy Grail],
Tristan and Iseult [Cornish Tristan goes to Ireland to get princess Iseult for uncle King Mark but
they drink potion that makes them love each other forever], Sir Gawain [beheads Green Night and
allows retaliation, tempted to commit adultery with Lord Bertilak's wife], Igraine [Arthur's mom],
Uther Pendragon [Arthur's father], Merlin [magician, tutors Arthur], Mordred [treacherous nephew,
battles Arthur at Camlan], Sir Galahad [leads a quest for the Holy Grail], Sir Launfal [gets wealth
from fairy; accused of insults by Guinevere], Morgan le Fay [sorceress sister and enemy of Arthur],
Gareth, Kay [Arthur's often brash steward], Sir Ector [Arthur's foster father], Bedivere; empty Siege
Perilous chair at Round Table; printed by William Caxton)
Pearl Poet
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (green knight challenges Arthur's knights to behead
him and be beheaded in a year; Gawain accepts and beheads him; year later goes to Green Chapel;
Lord Bercilak gives Gawain hunting gains in return for kisses he gets from Bercilak's wife; he fails
to give him green sash; Green Knight strikes at Gawain's neck thrice but only nicks it once since
he avoided adultery; Green Knight was Bercilak; all planned by Morgan le Fay)
Unknown Middle English
Everyman (Everyman receives summons from Death; friends Fellowship, Worldly Goods, and Beauty leave him but Good Deeds remains faithful but weak; morality play)
Unknown Middle English
The Mabinogion (Welsh tales, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest)
Wakefield Master
Towneley Mysteries (or Wakefield Mysteries; includes The Second Shepherd's Play)
Unknown Middle English
Robin Hood (Robin Hood, possibly earl of Huntington, born at Locksley Nottinghamshire; formed group in Sherwood Forest including Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Allan-a-Dale, Will Stutly, and Maid Marian to rob rich and give to poor; opposed by sheriff; bled to death by prioress of Kirkley)
Sir Thomas More
Utopia (Book I dialogue analyses ills in England; Book II describes Utopia, run with humanist ideals)
John Skelton
A Garland of Laurel, Philip Sparrow, Colin Clout
Sir Philip Sidney
Astrophel and Stella (sonnets by Astrophel [Sidney] for Stella [Penelope Devereux]), An Apologie for Poetrie
Edmund Spenser
Faerie Queene (planned 12 books for each private moral virtues; Prince Arthur
sees vision of Faerie Queen Gloriana [Elizabeth I]; evil Catholics Duessa [Mary], Archimago, and
Grantorto [Philip II]; 6 books: Red Cross Knight [Holiness], Sir Guyon [Temperance], Britomart
[Chastity], Cambel and Triamond [Friendship], Artegal [Justice], Calidore [Courtesy]), The
Shepheardes Calender (shepherd Colin Clout loves Rosalind)
John Donne
The Anniversaries (An Anatomy of the World, Of the Progresse of the Soule; in
memory of Robert Drury's daughter Elizabeth), Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
Abraham Cowley
Poetical Blossoms, Davideis
George Herbert
The Temple
Richard Crenshaw
John Milton
Paradise Lost (Raphael tells Adam about Satan's revolt and expulsion; Satans as
serpent tempts Eve to eat forbidden fruit and Adam does also; Sin and Death enter world;
Michael leads them out of Garden of Eden),
Paradise Regained (Jesus resists Satan's temptations; suggested by Quaker Thomas Ellwood),
Samson Agonistes (Samson betrayed by Delilah, blinded by Philistines, and destroys temple),
Il Penseroso,
Lycidas (commemorates death of schoolmate Edward King; title from shepherd in Bucolic),
Areopagitica (pamphlet against restriction of freedom of the press),
Comus (young lady left by two brothers in the woods captured by Comus, god of sensual pleasure)
Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy (Spanish marshal Hieronimo's son Horatio, who loves Bel-
Imperia, is slain by her brother Lorenzo and the prince of Portugal; Hieronimo finds his body
hanging in the arbor; Hieronimo and Bel Imperia kill villains while performing a play and
Hieronimo kills self; 9 die on stage)
Christopher Marlowe
Tamburlaine (Scythian shepherd Tamburlaine becomes Persian king and marries
Soldan's daughter Zenocrate),
Dr. Faustus (Germany: scholar Faustus sells soul to devil),
Jew of Malta (Barabas looses fortune and wants revenge on invading Turks;
murders daughter and whole nunnery with poisoned porridge; dies in
bubbling cauldron)
Robert Greene
A Groatsworth of Wit
John Lyly
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Lodge
George Peele
University of Wits
William Shakespeare
(First Folio compiled by Heminges and Condell, including all but Pericles) -
comedies:
All's Well That Ends Well (France: Helena cures French king and chooses to
marry Bertram, she tricks him to gain his ring and bear his child),
As You Like It (Rosalind disguises herself as boy Ganymede and meets
Orlando, who is reconciled to his brother Oliver by saving his life; Duke
Frederick becomes a monk and four couples are united at feast of Hymen;
clown Touchstone woos Audrey),
Comedy of Errors (Aemilia and Aegeon have twins, both named
Antipholus, and both with slaves Dromio; one goes to Syracuse and one to
Ephesus but eventually reunited after much confusion),
Cymbeline (Britain: King Cymbeline banishes Posthumous Leonatus who
married his daughter Imogen; in Rome Iachimo bets Imogen will be unfaithful
and steals her bracelet; servant Pisanio allows Imogen to escape dressed as a
boy; Iachimo's villany exposed),
Love's Labor's Lost (4 men vow to eschew women for 3 years but fall in love;
King Ferdinand of Navarre with French princess, Biron with Rosaline, Longaville
with Maria, and Dumain with Katherine; others include Don Armado, clown
Costard, and constable Dull),
Measure for Measure (Vienna: Duke Vincentio disguises self as Friar Lodowick
and appoints Antonio to enforce laws; Claudio sentenced to death for seducing
Juliet; his sister Isabella refuses to yield to Antonio to save Claudio; Lodowick
arranges to trick Antonio into thinking Mariana is Isabella),
Merchant of Venice (Antonio borrows money from Jewish Shylock to send
Bassanio from Venice to Belmont to marry Portia, promising a pound of flesh if
not repaid in three months; Portia and maid Nerissa rescue Antonio at his trial;
Shylock's daughter Jessica elopes with Bassanio's friend Lorenzo),
Merry Wives of Windsor (Sir John Falstaff tries to seduce Mrs. Ford and Mrs.
Page, who trick him; Mr. Ford disguises self as Mr. Brook; Slender and Dr. Caius
love Mrs. Page's daughter Anne but she elopes with Fenton)
Midsummer Night's Dream (Theseus duke of Athens marries Amazon Queen
Hippolyta; Egeus makes his daughter Hermia, who loves Lysander,
marry Demetrius, who is loved by Helena; found by Fairy King Oberon and
Queen Titania; Puck uses magic love-juice; weaver Bottom and his artisans
perform Pyramus and Thisbe play),
Much Ado about Nothing (friends get Benedick and Beatrice to marry; Don
John stages assignation between Borachio and Margaret to keep Claudio from
marrying Hero but fails),
Pericles Prince of Tyre (Pericles accuses King Antiochus of incest with
daughter; Pericles flees Tyre and is shipwrecked at Pentapolis and marries King
Simonides' daughter Thaisa; Thaisa has baby Marina but is presumed dead and
put to sea in a chest; Ephesian Cerimon revives Thaisa and she becomes
votaress in temple of Diana; Cleon raises Marina but wife Dionyza tries to kill
her, but is rescued by pirates and marries Lysimachus; Pericles finds Marina),
Taming of the Shrew (play performed for drunken tinker Christopher Sly;
Petruchio marries high-tempered Katharina, daughter of Baptista, and "tames
her", winning a bet on test of wife's obedience; Lucentio becomes tutor of
Katharina's sister Bianca and marries her),
The Tempest (Prospero's brother Antonio and King Alonso of Naples, who had
usurped his dukedom of Milan 12 years earlier, wreck in tempest on enchanted
island where Prospero reigns; they search for Alonso's son Ferdinand, who
landed elsewhere and fell in love with Prospero's daughter Miranda; sprite
Ariel plays music; all reconciled),
Trolius and Cressida (Trojan prince Troilus pursues Cressida during Trojan War
truce; Pandarus helps them get together; her dad exchanges her for a Trojan
prisoner; Diomedes brings her to Greek camp; at feast in Achilles' tent Troilus
learns she is unfaithful; Hector kills Patroclus and Achilles kills Hector),
Twelfth Night or What You Will (Sebastian and sister Viola shipwreck off
Illyria; she disguises self as boy Cesario, becomes page of Orsino, and loves
him; Orsino loves Olivia, who mourns for her dead brother; Olivia loves Viola
and marries look-alike Sebastian; Orsino marries Viola; Maria, Sir Toby Belch,
and Sir Andrew Aguecheek work against Olivia's steward Malvolio in low comedy),
Two Gentlemen of Verona (friends Valentine and Proteus both want duke of
Milan's daughter Silvia, who loves foolish Thurio; Proteus dumps Julia and
banishes Valentine; Silvia joins Valentine and they are pursued by Proteus,
whose page is Julia disguised; Valentine rescues Silvia from Proteus and they
marry; Proteus repents and marries Julia);
tragedies:
Hamlet (Denmark: when Hamlet's dad dies, uncle Claudius marries his mom
Gertrude and becomes king; dad's ghost accuses Claudius of murdering him;
Polonius [who gives advice to son: "to thine own self be true"] believes Hamlet
is mad because he rejects his daughter Ophelia; Claudius reacts violently to play
about the king's death; Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius and is sent to England
with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who have letters telling king to kill Hamlet;
Ophelia commits suicide; Hamlet and her brother Laertes both die in duel;
Norway King Fortinbras restores order),
Othello The Moor of Venice (Iago offended because Othello appointed Cassio
chief lieutenant; Iago hints Othello's wife Desdemona, daughter of Senator
Brabantio, had affair with Cassio; finds her handkerchief in Cassio's
possession; Othello strangles Desdemona; Iago's wife Emilia discovers plot;
Iago tortured; "loved not wisely but too well"),
King Lear (King Lear divides kingdom among two daughters Regan and Goneril
who pretended to love him; third daughter Cordelia becomes wife of French king
and is later hanged; Lear's servant earl of Kent is put in stocks; Edmund turns
Gloucester against his real son Edgar),
Macbeth (shortest Shakespeare play; tribute to James I; three witches tell
Macbeth he will be thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and king, and that sons of
friend Banquo will later be kings; Lady Macbeth convinces him to murder King
Duncan; Macbeth murders Banquo but his son Fleance escapes; Lady Macbeth
sleepwalks and commits suicide; Macduff and Duncan's son Malcolm kill
Macbeth and Malcolm becomes king),
Julius Caesar (Cassius convinces Brutus that Julius Caesar is threat to Rome;
Brutus talks with wife Portia; Brutus and Cassius murder Caesar on Ides of March
although he had been warned by wife Calpurnia; Antony speaks at Caesar's
funeral and inflames citizens against murderers, Cassius and Brutus lose to
Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius at Philippi and commit suicide),
Antony and Cleopatra (Rome and Egypt: Marc Antony, Roman triumvir,
leaves wife Octavia for Cleopatra, queen of Egypt; loses Battle of Actium to
Octavian; Antony and Cleopatra commit suicide),
Romeo and Juliet (Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet secretly married by
Friar Laurence; her cousin Tybalt kills his friend Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt
and is banished from Verona; Juliet takes sleeping potion rather than marry Paris;
Romeo drinks poison; Juliet stabs self),
Timon of Athens (Timon abandoned by friends when he has financial problems
as Apemantus had warned; Timon leaves Athens and finds gold and General
Alcibiades in a cave; Timon finances Alcibiades' expedition against Athens
because he was banished for defending a condemned soldier; servant Flavius
rewarded; they reach compromise with Athens to only get revenge on enemies
but then Timon dies),
Titus Andronicus (Titus Andronicus beats Goths and returns to Rome with
Queen Tamora and 3 sons; 1 son sacrificed; Saturninus declared emperor and
claims Titus's daughter Lavinia; his brother Bassanius abducts Lavinia and he
marries Tamora; Tamora and Moorish lover Aaron kill Bassanius and rape
Lavinia, cutting off her hands and tongue; 2 of Titus's sons executed and
another banished, and leads Gothic army; Titus serves Tamora her sons in a
pie, kills Lavinia, and stabs Tamora; Saturninus kills Titus and is killed by Lucius),
Coriolanus (Caius Martius renamed Coriolanus after defeating Volscians at
Corioli; joins Aufidius and plans to attack Rome; persuaded by mom Volumnia
and wife Virgilia to spare city; murdered by Aufidius),
Winter's Tale (Queen Hermione invites King Polixenes of Bohemia to stay
longer but King Leontes orders Camillo to poison him, but Camillo flees with
Polixenes; Hermione sent to prison and daughter abandoned on shore; Leontes
repents; 16 years later Polixenes' son Florizel loves Leontes' lost daughter
Perdita, a shepherdess, and they flee to Sicilia and marry; Leontes and
Polixenes reconciled);
historical dramas:
King John (King John, supported by Philip Faulconbridge, fights Arthur duke of
Brittany and the pope; John is poisoned and son Henry III becomes king),
Richard II (King Richard banishes Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray; Henry's
dad John of Gaunt dies and Richard confiscates inheritance to finance Irish war;
Henry invades England and imprisons Richard, becoming King Henry IV; Sir
Pierce of Exton murders Richard and Henry does penance in Holy Land),
Richard III (Richard duke of Gloucester causes death of brother George duke of
Clarence and marries Lady Anne; imprisons Edward's sons in Tower and
seizes power with duke of Buckingham's help; defeated at Bosworth Field by
Lancaster under earl of Richmond ["a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse"],
earl of Richmond becomes King Henry VII and marries Elizabeth, ending 30 year
War of the Roses),
Henry IV Part I (Henry Percy [Hotspur] defeats Scottish barons and demands
ransom of Edmund Mortimer, captured by Owen Glendower; Henry IV refuses
to ransom the pretender to the throne, so Percy family joins the rebels; Prince
Hal [future Henry V] follows Sir John Falstaff and his revelers but defeats
rebels at Shrewsbury, killing Hotspur),
Henry IV Part II (earl of Northumberland leads rebels who agree to disband but
treacherous John of Lancaster kills them; Hal becomes king and banishes Falstaff),
Henry V (Henry V invades France, wins at Agincourt 1415, and marries Catherine of Valois;
Falstaff dies),
Henry VI Part I (Henry VI's uncles John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke
of Gloucester take control; French under Joan La Pucelle drive out English;
Richard Plantagenet quarrels with Beuforts of Lancaster; Henry marries
Margaret of Anjou rather than daughter of French earl of Armagnac),
Henry VI Part II (Margaret of Anjou and duke of Suffolk convict duchess of
Gloucester of sorcery to force Humprhey's retirement; Riachard Plantagenet
encourages Jack Cade to rebel, then defeats Henry at St. Albans 1455),
Henry VI Part III (Richard Plantagenet agrees to let Henry VI rule during his
lifetime; Margaret of Anjou puts Richard to death at Wakefield but his sons
Edward IV and Richard III defeat her at Towton; Edward IV becomes king and
marries Lady Elizabeth Grey and defeats Margaret at Tewkesbury 1471, killing
Henry's son Edward prince of Wales; Richard III murders Henry in the Tower),
Henry VIII (Edward Stafford wanted to warn Henry about Cardinal Wolsey but
is falsely accused of treason and executed; Thomas Cranmer annuls Henry's
marriage to Katharine of Aragon and Henry marries Anne Bullen),
Sonnets (154; 3 quatrains and couplet; 1-126 to noble friend, maybe Henry Wriothesley
earl of Southampton; 127-152 to "Dark Lady"; 153-154 Greek epigram), The Phoenix and
the Turtle, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece
Ben Jonson
Volpone (childless Venetian nobleman Volpone [Fox], aided by servant Mosca [Fly],
pretends to be sick so that many will rush to him with rich gifts to ensure he is in line to
inherit forture; visitors include lawyer Voltore [Vulture], miser Corbaccio [Crow] who
disinherits son, and Corvino [Raven] who offers his wife)
The Alchemist (Subtle and Doll Common set up shop in Lovewit's house while he is
gone; they trick Face and Sir Epicure Mammon but not Surly),
Everyman in His Humour (London: Wellbred and Young Kno'well escape brother-in-law
and father; Captain Bobadil [braggart], Kitely [jealous], Stephen [stupid], Kno'well
[suspicious], Dame Kitely [jealous] humours)
Epicene or The Silent Woman (Morose tries to disinherit his nephew Sir Dauphine by
marrying silent Epicene, who turns out to be talkative boy in disguise),
The Poetaster (attacks Thomas Kekker and John Marston in War of Theaters)
Beaumont and Fletcher
(Jonson's "disciples") -
Philaster or Love Lies A-Bleeding (king of Calabria and Sicily's daughter Arethusa loves
Philaster but engaged to Pharamond prince of Spain; Pharamon's evilness made known
and he accuses Arethusa of affair with page Bellario, actually a disguised girl; Arethusa
saves Philaster by marrying her),
The Maid's Tragedy (Amintor forced to marry friend Melantius's sister Evadne rather than Aspatia;
Melantius plots against king and Evandne kills the king, to whom she had been mistress),
A King and No King
John Fletcher: The Faithful Shepherdess (Clorin loved by Thenot), The Two Noble Kinsmen
(Theseus hosts tournament in which Arcite wins hand of Theseus's sister-in-law Emilia and
Palamon is to be beheaded but Arcite falls off horse and gives Palamon Emilia), The Wild
Goose Chase (Oriana tries to win Mirabel by making by jealousy and pity)
Francis Beaumont: The Knight of the Burning Pestle (grocer interrupts The London Merchant play
with his own play The Knight of the Burning Pestle starring apprentice Ralph like Don Quixote)
Son of Ben Jonson
Thomas Carew
Robert Herrick
To Make Much of Time, To the Virgins, Delight in Disorder,
Hesperides, Corinna's Going A-Maying
Richard Lovelace
To Althea from Prison
John Suckling
Aglaura, Session of the Poets, Brennoralt
Thomas Dekker
The Honest Whor Part I (Hippolito loves duke's daughter Infelice, who is sent
to convent; Bellafont loves Hippolito; Hippolito marries Infelice and Bellafont marries Matheo),
The Honest Whor Part II (Bellafont's father Orlando Frscobaldo disguises self as her husband
Matheo's servant; Bellafont falsely accused of prostitution), Old Fortunatus (goddess Fortune
gives beggar riches but it brings only trouble; Vice and Virtue)
Thomas Middleton
A Trick to Catch the Old Onepoor (Theodorus Witgood tries to get money from uncle by pretending to be engaged to Widow Medler, who marries Hoard)
Dekker and Middleton
The Roaring Girl (Moll Cutpurse helps Sebastian Wengrave win approval of Mary Fitzallard's father Sir Alexander to marry her)
Robert Southwell
The Burning Babe
Francis Bacon
Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis (voyage to Bensalem Island, which had Solomon's House, inspiration for Royal Society), Novum Organum (presents "new instrument" of inductive method)
John Locke
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (views mind at birth as tabula rasa with no innate ideas; led to growth of empiricism), Treatises on Government
Edward Gibbon
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (from Trajan to fall of Constantinople 1453)
David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan (supports strong government to combat egoism, root of all social conflict)
Izaak Walton
The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation (angler Piscator and hunter Venator argue over best sport; friend Auceps silenced)
John Dryden
Absalom and Achitophel (attacks Puritan attempts to exclude Catholic
duke of York from English throne; Achitophel [earl of Shaftesbury], Absalom
[duke of Monmouth]; added to by Nahum Tate),
MacFlecknoe (depicts Thomas Shadwell as successor of Richard Flecknoe in bad verse),
Conqust of Grenada,
The Medal (criticizes earl of Shaftesbury, acquitted of treason),
The Hind and the Panther (James II is lion who protects hind [Church of Rome] from bear
[Independents], wolf [Presbyterians], hare [Quakers], ape [Freethinkers], boar
[Anabaptists], fox [Arians], and panther [Church of England]),
All for Love or The World Well Lost (Antony and Cleopatra),
Essay of Dramatic Poesie (4 Englishmen on barge on Thames want to see battle
with Dutch fleet; talk about drama),
Annus Mirabilis (describes 1666 London fire and Dutch War),
translated Vergil
Thomas Otway
Venice Preserved (Venetian Jaffeir marries senator Priuli's daughter Belvidera and joins conspiracy with friend Pierre but tells senate about it when co-conspirator Renault makes advances at Belvidera; conspirators sentenced to die)
George Villiers
The Rehearsal
William Congreave
(comedy of manners)
Love for Love (Angelica helps Valentine get back his inheritance, which he
gave to his sea-faring brother Ben so his father Sir Sampson Legend would
pay his debts),
Way of the World (witty Mirabell loves Millamant but pretends to like her aunt
Lady Wishfort; Mirabell and Millamant negotiate agreement to marry; others
include Wishfort's nephew Sir Wilfull Witwoud, servants Waitwell and
Foible, and Fainalls),
The Mourning Bride
Samuel Pepys
Secret Diary
Isaac Newton
Principia (The Motion of Bodies, The Motion of Bodies in Resisting Media, The System of the World)
John Bunyan
Pilgrims Progress (Christian leaves City of Destruction through Wicket-
gate led by Evangelist; goes through Slough of Despond, Cross, Holy Sepulcher, Hill
Difficulty, House Beautiful, Valley of Humiliation, Valley of the Shadow of Death,
Vanity [with a fair that sells all empty things], plain of Ease, Hill of Lucre [free silver
mine], Doubting Castle, Delectable Mountains, Enchanted Ground, Beulah, River of
Death, and Celestial City; meets Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, Mr. Good-will, friend Apollyon,
Hopeful, Faithful, and Giant Despair; in Part II wife Christiana, kids, Mercy, and Mr.
Great-heart go to Celestial City), Life and Death of Mr. Badman
Alexander Pope
Essay on Criticism ("little learning is a dangerous thing"; "to err is human, to
forgive divine"),
Essay on Man,
Rape of the Lock (epic treatment of real incident in which Lord Petre cut a lock
of Arabella Fermor's hair, leading to family feud; heroine Belinda),
The Dunciad (attacks Pope's critics including Lewis Theobald; Colley Cibber
king of the Dunces, and goddess Dullness prevails),
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (dialogue between Pope and a physician, attacking
Addison and Hervey),
` translated Iliad
Jonathan Swift
Tale of a Tub (ridicule of religious extremists; brothers Peter [Catholic], Jack
[Protestants], and Martin [Lutheran/Anglican]; Grub Street hacker writer
reveals in Digression of Madness he is an inmate of Bedlam),
Modest Proposal (satirically proposes raising Irish children for food),
Gulliver's Travels (ship physician Lemuel Gulliver visits Lilliput [tiny people],
Brobdingnag [giants], Laputa [scientists], and Houyhnhnmland [horses,
masters of Yahoo people]),
Battle of the Books (ridicules arguments of William Temple and Richard
Bentley about ancient vs. modern authors; battle in St. James Library),
Journal to Stella (diary)
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
Spectator (essays by Spectator Club members, including
Mr. Spectator, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb, Andrew Freeport, and
Capt. Sentry)
Richard Steele
The Tatler (pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff)
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe [based on real-life Alexander Selkirk] is
shipwrecked and lives 24 years on island near Orinoco River; saves native
man Friday from cannibals and becomes his friend; recaptures ship and
returns to England),
Moll Flanders (Moll Flanders born at Newgate, works as prostitute, marries five
times, sent to Virginia, died penitent),
A Journal of the Plague Year (account of plague by Londoner "HF", 1665)
Samuel Johnson
Dictionary of the English Language (refused belated patronage of Lord Chesterfield),
Rasselas (Rasselas, sister Nekayah, and mentor Imlac escape Oriental Happy
Valley to explore world; visit Cairo; return to Happy Valley),
Lives of the Poets (connects lives and work of 52 poets from Cowley to his
contemporaries),
Rambler (semi-weekly essays)
James Boswell
Life of Samuel Johnson (notes of conversations with Dr. Johnson;
remembered with help of Edmund Malone)
Oliver Goldsmith
Vicar of Wakefield (kindly Vicar Charles Primrose loses income and moves
family to humbler house; daughter Olivia abducted by Squire Thornhill; house
burns down and Primrose is imprisoned for debt; daughter Sophia is abducted;
son George is imprisoned avenging Sophia; Thornhill's uncle Sir William
Thornhill straightens everything out and marries Sophia),
Deserted Village (rural depopulation of late 1700s),
She Stoops to Conquer (Marlow loves Miss Hardcastle but is tricked into
believing her dad's castle is a village end; Miss Hardcastle poses as barmaid
an poor relative to seduce Marlow),
The Citizen of the World (Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi reports on visit
to England; Lien's son rescues daughter of Man in Black from Persia),
The Good Natur'd Man (Honeywood imprisoned to see if friends leave him; he
loves Miss Richland, who secures his freedom),
Goody Two-shoes
Richard Sheridan
School for Scandal (Joseph Surface makes overtures to Lady Teazle to get access to her
husband Sir Peter's ward Maria, who loves Joseph's brother Charles; Lady
Sneerwell has gossip club; Lady Teazle hides behind screen and Sir Peter hides in a
closet; Joseph's uncle Sir Oliver Surface returns from India disguised as Mr.
Premium but Charles won't sell him portrait of his uncle),
The Rivals (Capt. Jack Absolute, son of Anthony Absolute, woos Lydia Languish under
guise of Ensign Beverly; Lydia's aunt Mrs. Malaprop, who makes many funny
mispronunciations, wants her to marry Absolute; Absolute's friend Bob Acres
loves Lydia and challenges Beverly to duel; Lydia and Absolute marry)
Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (ends with "The Epitaph")
William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (contrast each other; The
Lamb vs. The Tiger [Tiger Tiger Burning bright], The Divien Image vs. The Human
Abstract, etc.), Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (doctrine of Contraries),
Milton (John Milton returns from Heaven to correct misinterpretations of his work)
Bishop Thomas Percy
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (including Sir Patrick Spens and Edward Edward)
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa (Clarissa Harlowe commanded to marry Mr.
Soames, whom she despises, and flees with Robert Lovelace, who drugs and rapes her;
longest novel in English), Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (first modern novel; son of
maidservant Pamela Andrew's employer, Mr. B, pursues her but she resists, marries,
and reforms him)
Henry Fielding
Tom Jones (Squire Allworthy raises son Tom Jones of his servant Jenny Jones
and son Blifil of sister Bridget and Captain Blifil; Blifil tries to get Tom into
trouble; both love Squire Western's daughter Sophia; Tom has affair with
gameskeeper's daughter and is sent to London, having many adventures
along the way; Jenny appears and says Tom is actually Bridget's son; Tom
marries Sophia; others include schoolmaster Partridge and Lady Bellaston),
Joseph Andrews (Pamela's brother Joseph Andrews refuses employer Lady
Booby's advances and flees to his love Fanny Goodwill in London; Parson
Adams rescues them and they marry),
Amelia (Amelia is the wife of imprisoned Captain Booth; she refuses Captain
James but he has affair with Miss Matthews),
The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (highwayman Jonathan Wild represents Walpole),
Tom Thumb
Tobias Smollett
Humphrey Clinker (workhouse lad Humphrey Clinker works for Brambles and loves
their maid Winifred Jenkins; becomes Methodist preacher; epistolary novel),
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (rascal Peregrine Pickle raised by aunt
Grizzle Pickle and one-eyed veteran uncle; marries Amanda)
The Adventures of Roderick Random (Scottish Roderick, who killed an officer
in a duel, and Hugh Strap go to sea; Roderick loves Narcissa but opposed by
Sir Timothy Thicket and Lord Quiverwit; Roderick flees to France and plans
to marry Miss Melinda Goosetrap; goes to sea with uncle Tom Bolwing and
finds lost dad Don Rodrigo in South America)
Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy (disorganized account of first years of life,
interspersed with long reflections and accounts of Yorck, father Walter Shandy, mom,
and Uncle Toby; includes one-sentence chapters, blank pages, and unfinished
sentences), A Sentimental Journey (trip through France and Italy; Yorick weeps over
donkey chewing thistle)
John Cleland
Fanny Hill The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (prostitute Fanny Hill; novel banned for vulgarity)
Horace Walpole
The Castle of Otranto (Manfred, grandson of usurper who had poisoned Alfonso, wants to marry Isabella after his son Conrad is crushed by a helmet,
but she is rescued by Theodore and Alfonso's ghost destroys the castle)
William Cowper
John Gilpin (London linen draper Gilpin goes to Edmonton), The Task (6 books: The Sofa, The Time-piece, The Garden, The Winter Evening, The Winter Morning Walk, The Winter Walk at Noon)
Wordsworth and Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads (launched Romanticism; includes Tintern Abbey and Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (seaman does penance for killing friendly
albatross in Antarctic), Kubla Khan (Mongol emperor Kubla Khan; written during opium dream),
Christabel (witch Lady Geraldine casts spell over Christabel and her father Sir Leoline, despite
bard Bracy's revelatory dream)
William Wordsworth
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (ivory-covered ruin on river
Wye in Monmouthshire), Ode: Intimations of Immortality (Platonic "recollection"; celebrates child),
The Daffodils, The Recluse (including The Excursion), The Prelude (autobiographical), Simon Lee
(poet helps hunter Simon dig up tree root), Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room
Sir Walter Scott
Lady of the Lake (James Fitz-James, Knight of Snowden, loves Ellen, daughter of outlaw
James of Douglas; local hero Roderick Dhu fights for Ellen, but she loves Malcolm),
Ivanhoe (1100s England: Wilfred knight of Ivanhoe rejects Rebecca the Jewess and loves
Rowena but dad Cedric wants her to marry Saxon Athelstane; Black Knight [Richard the
Lion-Hearted], Knight Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Locksley [Robin Hood]
become involved; tournaments at Ashby-de-la-Zouche and Torquilstone),
The Antiquary (William Lovel loves daughter of Arthur Wardour),
The Bride of Lammermoor (Lord Ravenswood's son Edgar loves Lucy, daughter of
William Ashton who has tricked his dad; Lucy forced to marry Frank Hayston),
Guy Mannering (Guy Mannering predicts Harry Bertram will have crises at ages 5 and
21; sister Lucy cared for by Dominie Sampson; Harry befriends Mannering and marries
his daughter Julia),
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (families of Baron Henry of Cranstown and Lady Margaret
of Bransome Hall feud),
Peveril of the Peak (Cavalier Julian Peveril loves Roundhead Alice Bridgenorth; 1678
Popish Plot),
Quentin Durward (Louis XI Scottish Guardsman Durward saves king's life in boar hunt
and wins Isabell countess of Croye),
Marmion A Tale of Flodden Field (Lord marmion rejects Constance and loves Lady
Clare; he dies at Flodden Field),
The Talisman (Sir Kenneth helps Richard I fight Saladin),
Waverley Novels (32 novels published anonymously)
George Gordon Lord Byron
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Childe Harold goes on pilgrimage across Europe
disillusioned with life of pursuing pleasure),
Don Juan (Don Juan sent from Spain by mom Donna Inez; shipwrecks in Greece but
nursed by Haidee; sold as slave to Gulbeyas of Constantinople but loves Dudu;
attracts Empress Catherine in Russia; sent to England),
The Corsair (pirate chief Conrad imprisoned by Sultan Seyd but released by Gulnare but
finds his love Medora dead; returns to Greece and is shot),
The Destruction of Sennacherib (plague in Assyrian army),
The Prisoner of Chillon (two brothers of Francois de Bonnivard die in dungeon),
Manfred (Count Manfred sells self to Prince of Darkness and lives alone in Alps)
Robert Southey
The Battle of Blenheim, biographies of Nelson, Wesley, and Cowper
Ann Radcliffe
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Monk (devil sends Matilda to seduce vulnerable monk Ambrosio in Madrid)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prometheus Unbound (son Demogorgon drives Jupiter from throne; Hercules rescues Prometheus, who is reunited with wife Asia), Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Adonais (to Keats), The Cloud, Ozymandias (vanity of tyrants), The Sensitive Plant
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (Germany: student
Frankenstein creates nameless monster by galvanism which is shunned by all and turns to evil;
destroys Frankenstein at the North Pole)
John Keats
Eve of St. Agnes (Madeline glimpses future husband Porphyro on Eve of St. Agnes),
Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Endymion (shepherd on Mount Latmus loved by
moon goddess Selene), Hyperion (Titan sun god Hyperion overthrown by Apollo),
La Belle Dame snas merci, Isabella or The Pot of Basil (Isabella plants head of beloved
Lorenzo in pot of basil after her brothers killed him), On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Charles Lamb
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Essays of Elia (including A Dissertation on Roast Pig), Dream Children A Reverie (written at death of brother James)
Thomas De Quincy
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Edmund Burke
On American Taxation, On Conciliation with the Colonies, Reflections on the French Revolution
Robert Burns
The Cotter's Saturday Night (Jenny), The Holy Fair (sisters Fun, Usupersitition, and Hypocrisy visit Holy Fair at Mauchline), Tam o'Shanter (witches pursue Tam but
cannot cross river Doon; Cutty Sark cuts off horse's tail)
Thomas Babbington Macaulay
History of England, Critical and Historical Essays
John Henry Newman
Apology for His Life (Catholic)
Benjamin Disraeli
Sybil or the Two Nations, Tancred or the New Crusade
Thomas Carlyle
Sartor Resartus (Tailor Retailored; Prof. Diogenes Teufelsdrockh at Weissnichtwo loves Rose Goddess Blumine but is discarded and wanders for 10 years), On Heroes Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
John Ruskin and Walter Pater
(combated social problems)
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Locksley Hall (last look at home of his youth; loves cousin Amy),
In Memoriam (elegy for friend Arthur Hallam),
Idylls of the King (King Arthur; The Coming of Arthur, Gareth and Lynette, Geraint and
Enid, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and Elaine, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Etarre, The Last
Tournament, Guinievere, The Passing of Arthur),
The Lotus-Eaters,
The Lady of Shalott (Camelot: Lady of Shalott cannot engage real world directly),
The Charge of the Light Brigade (Crimean War, Battle of Balaklava October 25 1854:
600 die following orders they know to be bad),
Crossing the Bar (putting out to sea compared to death)
Robert Browning
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics,
Men and Women,
My Last Duchess (duke of Ferrara murdered wife for not appreciating honor of marrying him),
Pippa Passes (Pippa works in Asolo Italy silk mills; "God's in His Heaven - All's right
with the world"),
Prospice (written after wife's death),
Sordello (1200s south Europe poet debates action and song),
The Ring and the Book (Guido Franceschini of Florence marries Pompilia Comparini
whose parents learn he is not really rich; Pompilia fees to Rome and accused of affair with
priest Caponsacchi and banished to nunnery, where she has child; Guido murders
Pompilia and parents and is executed)
Elizabeth Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese (expression of love for husband Robert
Browning), The Cry of the Children (decries child labor), Lady Geraldine's Courtship (lady marries
peasant-pope; praised Robert Browning)
Matthew Arnold
Essays in Criticism, Dover Beach, Culture and Anarchy, The Scholar-Gipsy
Charles Swinburne
Atalanta in Calydon, Songs Before Sunrise
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris
(Pre-Raphaelites)
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice (Mrs. Bennet tries to find matches for 5 daughters; Lydia Bennet
elopes with officer Wickham; arrogant Mr. Darcy, who had interfered with courtship of
friend Bingley and Jane Bennet, proposes to Elizabeth Bennet; she refuses but later her
prejudice and his pride dissolve and they marry; also includes Mr. Collins and Lady
Catherine de Bourgh),
Emma (Emma Woodhouse interferes in love life of Harriet Smith, encouraging her to
take Mr. Elton rather than Robert Martin; also interferes with Jane Fairfax and Frank
Churchill; eventually she marries George Knightley),
Sense and Sensibility (Elinor Dashwood bears desertion by Edward Ferrars, who was
secretly engaged to Lucy Steele and disinherited by mom, with dignity; Lucy turns to
Edward's brother Robert when he gets inheritance and Edward proposes to Elinor;
sister Marianne gets very upset about desertion by John Willoughby but finally
marries Col. Brandon),
Persuasion (Anne Elliott breaks engagement with Captain Wentworth but then they
renew the engagement)
Northanger Abbey (Mrs. Allen and Catherine Morland visit Bath; Catherine loves
clergyman Henry Tilney but fears his home after reading Radcliffe's Mysteries of
Udolpho; they marry),
Mansfield Park (Fanny Price raised with Uncle Thomas Bertram's 4 kids; Fanny loves
cousin Edmund who loves Mary Crawford; Mary's brother Henry loves Maria Bertgram
then Fanny Price then Maria again; Edmund finally marries Fanny)
Charles Dickens
Bleak House (Chancery, London: narrator Esther Summerson, illegitimate daughter of
Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon; lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn suspects past and is killed,
as is Lady Dedlock; Krook spontaneously combusts; Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce case drags
on for years in courts),
Oliver Twist (Oliver born in workhouse and asked for more gruel; apprenticed by Mr.
Bumble to undertaker Mr. Sowerberry; gang under Fagin including Jack Dawkins the
Artful Dodger, Nancy, Bill Sikes, and Charley Bates tries to make Oliver a thief;
half-brother Monks tries to corrupt him to get all of father's property; adopted by Mr.
Brownlow and cared for by Mrs. Maylie and foster child Rose [his aunt]),
David Copperfield (London: David Copperfield sent to Mr. Creakle's school by cruel
stepfather Mr. Murdstone; idolizes classmate Steerforth; works in warehouse and lives
with Mr. Micawber; runs away to great-aunt Betsey Trotwood; later lives with lawyer
Mr. Wickfield; marries Dora Spenlow but she dies; unctuous Uriah Heep foiled; David
marries Wickfield's daughter Agnes; other characters include reliable Traddles,
"ever willin'" Barkis, and eccentric Peggotty family),
Great Expectations (Philip Pirrip [Pip] raised by blacksmith Joe Gargery; meets convict
Magwitch; visits Miss Havisham, who had been left at the altar years before, and her
niece Estella; goes to London due to patron Magwitch, who is Estella's father; Estella's
husband Bentley Drummle dies),
Our Mutual Friend (Mr. Boffins and Wilfer's friend John Harmon left a fortune if he will
marry Bella Wilfer; disguises self as John Rokesmith and falls in love with Bella and
drops assumed name and gets fortune),
Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby participates in anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and
sentenced to death but reprieved by Gabriel Varden; carries raven Grip with him; father
murdered employer Mr. Haredale),
A Christmas Carol (miser Ebinezer Scrooge, partner of deceased Marley, converted by
visions of past, present, and future Christmases; sees the Cratchits, including Tiny Tim
and Bob, Scrooge's secretary),
A Tale of Two Cities (Dr. Alexander Manette, unjustly imprisoned in Bastille, is released
and waits for rescuers in attic of Defarge's wine shop, and then returns to London with
daughter Lucie; St. Evremonde's nephew Charles Darnay is accused of treason but
defense counsel Stryver points out resemblance to Sydney Carton; Darnay marries Lucie
and later returns to Paris to save a servant but is arrested during French Revolution;
Sydney takes Charles's place on the guillotine because he loves Lucie),
Dombey and Sons (Mr. Dombey wants son Paul to continue his business but he dies;
ignored daughter Florence but later reconciled),
Martin Chezzlewit (Martin Chezzlewit turned away by grandfather and goes to US with
friend Mark Tapley; loses everything as architect for fraudulent Eden Land Corp; returns
home and marries Mary Graham; Jonas Chuzzlewit poisons dad, murders Montague Tigg,
and marries Mercy Pecksniff),
Little Dorrit (William Dorrit raises kids Edward, Fanny, and Amy in debtor's prison;
comes into fortune and all become despicable except Amy, who marries poor Arthur
Clennam in Marshalsea prison; Arthur struggles with Circumlocution Office),
The Pickwick Papers (pseudonym Boz; illustrated by Seymour; letters about club
founded by Samuel Pickwick; "Pickwickian sense" means insults that aren't really meant;
others include servant Sam Weller, landlady Mrs. Bardell, lawyers Dodson, Fogg, and
Serjeant Buzfuz, and actor Alfred Jingle),
Nicholas Nickleby (to support mom and sister Nicholas Nickleby works as usher for
cruel Wackford Squeers, in Mr. Crummles theater, and Cheeryble counting house; sister
Kate worked for milliner Mantalini; Uncle Ralph encourages Mulberry Hawk to seduce
Kate; Gride loves Madeline Bray; Ralph learns mistreated Smike is his son and commits
suicide; others include Ralph's clerk Newman Noggs),
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (orphans Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud betrothed by fathers
but break off engagement; Edwin murdered and Neville Landless is arrested but released;
Edwin's Uncle Jasper pursues Rosa; Mr. Datchery investigates; unfinished),
Hard Times (Thomas Gradgrind, a retired merchant, raises Louisa and Tom in grim
practicality; Louisa marries Tom's employer Josiah Bounderby; Tom robs bank and frames
Stephen Blackpool),
The Old Curiosity Shop (Daniel Quilp takes over curiosity shop of Nell Trent's
grandfather after he loses money gambling; Little Nell and grandfather work for Mrs.
Jarley's Wax Works and Thomas Codlin's puppet show; given house by schoolmaster
Mr. Marton and Little Nell tends graves; friend Kit Nubbles and grandfather's brother
search but find them dead; Kit marries Barbara)
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair a Novel without a Hero (Becky Sharp tries to win friend Amelia Sedley's
rich brother Joseph but fails; marries Sir Pitt Crawley's son Rawdon, who is disinherited,
but she lives well on small income with Lord Steyne's help until Rawdon finds out and
leaves Becky and son to become governor of Coventry Island; Becky is ostracized;
Amelia marries George Osborne but he dies at Waterloo and his dad Mr. Osborne cares
for their son Georgy; Amelia marries William Dobbin),
The Newcomes (Col. Thomas Newcome's artist son Clive marries Rosey Mackenzie and
then cousin Ethel Newcome),
The History of Henry Esmond Esquire (Henry Esmond raised by Francis Esmond, heir of
Castlewood estate; James Edward the Pretender loves Francis's daughter Beatrix; Henry
marries Rachel and goes to America),
The Virginians (sequel to Henry Esmond; Henry's grandsons George and Harry
Warrington grow up under aunt Baroness Bernstein in America; George fights for British
and Harry for friend Washington in Revolution),
The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon Esq. Written by Himself (Redmond Barry wins Countess
Lyndon and spends her money, ending up in Fleet Prison),
The History of Pendennis (Arthur Pendennis [Pen] spoiled by mom and relative Laura
Bell; writes novel; edits Pall Mall Gazette; marries Laura),
The Rose and the Ring (Fairy Blackstick controls magic rose and ring that make owner lovely)
Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers (Mrs. Proudie defeats chaplain Mr. Slope; Mr. Slope and others want to marry Eleanor Bold for her money but she slaps him; church warden Mr. Harding,
archdeacon Grantley, Bertie Stanhope)
Anne Bronte
Agnes Gray (ill-treated governess Agnes Gray marries curate Mr. Weston), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights (Ellis Bell pseudonym; Mr. Earnshaw raises waif Heathcliff at
Wuthering Heights; his daughter Catherine likes him while his son Hindley hates him; Heathcliff
leaves for 3 years when Catherine says marrying him would degrade her; Catherine marries Edgar
Linton; years later Hindley invites polished Heathcliff back and he elopes with Edgar's sister;
Catherine dies in childbirth; widower Heathcliff makes Catherine's daughter marry his sickly son
Linton; Heathcliff dies and Cathy devotes herself to cousin Hareton, Hindley's son)
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre (governess Jane Eyre eventually marries employer Edward
Rochester, who is married to an insane woman), Shirley (Yorkshire wool mill owner
Robert Gerand Moore deals with worker strife; heroine Shirley Keeldar based on Emily Bronte)
Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh (clergyman Theobald Pontifex's son Ernest lives in slums, goes to
jail for advances to a woman, marries vulgar Ellen but released because she was already
married, and devotes life to literature),
Erewhon (satirizes English attitudes in Utopia; anagram of Nowhere; narrator escapes
back to England but then returns to Erewhon as missionary),
Hudibras (county justice Hudibras and squire Ralpho set out to reform abuse and
suppress amusements; directed against Puritans; like Don Quixote)
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross)
Silas Marner or the Weaver of Raveloe (weaver Silas Marner, long ago accused of theft committed
by friend; robbed of his gold; finds abandoned yellow-haired baby Eppie whom he comes
to love; Squire Cass's son Dunstan disappers; Dunstan's brother Godfrey marries Nancy
Lammeter; Godfrey is actually Eppie's dad but she stays with Silas),
Adam Bede (1700s England: Adam Bede loves Hety Sorrel but she loves Arthur Donnithorne),
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (Dorothea Brooke marries Rev. Mr. Casaubon,
a scholar, who disillusions her and dies; she marries his cousin Will Ladislaw, forfeiting
Casaubon's estate; Dr. Lydgate marries selfish Rosamond Vincy and loses his earlier
medical ideals),
Felix Holt the Radical (watchmaker Felix Holt loves Esther; Felix is pardoned for murder that prevented
rioting; Esther chooses Felix over radical Parliament candidate Harold Transome),
The Mill on the Floss (Tom Tulliver, raised at Dorlcote Mill, keeps sister Maggie from marrying Philip
Wakem but she goes off with Stephen Guest, fianc� of her cousin Lucy Deane),
Romola (Florentine Romola marries Tito Melema and finds peace with help of Savonarola)
George Meredith
The Egoist (arrogant Sir Willoughby Patterne invites fianc�e Clara Middleton to his Hall
but she instead marries his cousin Vernon Whitford),
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Sir Austin Feverel tries to raise son Richard according to
own education system; Richard marries Lucy Desborough; nurse Bessie Berry and
uncle Austin Wentworth reconcile Austin and Lucy; Richard wounded in duel with
libertine who loves Lucy),
Modern Love
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Alice, Mad Hatter, Ugly
Duchess, Mock Turtle, Queen of Hearts, Cheshire Cat, Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse;
illustrated by Sir John Tenniel), Through the Looking Glass (Alice goes into mirror; world is
reversed; becomes white pawn in chess game with land divided by brooks and hedges; meets
Humpty Dumpty, Lion, Unicor, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and White Knight)
Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native (Clym Yeobright opens school on Egdon Heath and marries
Eustacia Vye, who loves Damon Wildeve, who married her cousin Thomasin; Clym's
eyes fail and he becomes a furze cutter; Mrs. Yeobright comes to son's house but
ignored by Eustacia and dies of fatigue and adder bite; Clym blames Eustacia who drowns
with Wildeve; Thomasin marries Diggory Venn; Clym becomes preacher),
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Tess Durbeyfield takes service with Mrs. D'Urberville, and
has child with her son Alec; Tess becomes dairymaid and marries Angel Clare, but he
leaves her because of her past; she returns to Tess but stabs him when Angel returns
and is hanged),
The Mayor of Casterbridge (drunk Michael Henchard sells wife Susan and daughter to
sailor Newson; Michael reforms and becomes mayor; Susan and Neson's daughter
Elizabeth-Jane returns; Donald Farfrae ruins Michael's fortunes, becomes mayor, and
marries Elizabeth-Jane),
Jude the Obscure (stonemason Jude Fawley marries Arabella who deserts him and their
son; cousin Sue Bridehead marries teacher Phillotson but flees to Jude; Jude and Sue
don't marry but have kids, who are killed by Arabella's son Father Time),
Far from the Madding Crowd (Bathsheba Everdne marries adventurer Sergeant Troy,
then engaged to William Boldwood who kills Troy, then marries Gabriel Oak),
A Pair of Blue Eyes (former boyfriends of Elfride Swancourt Stephen Smith and Henry
Knight meet on train but on arrival find her dead)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island (Jim Hawkins finds treasure map from sailor at mom's inn and goes on
schooner Hispaniola with Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelaney to find it; Jim thwarts mutiny
of Long John Silver; marooned sailor Ben Gunn helps them get treasure; blind villain Pew)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dr. Jekyll creates drug that transforms him into evil
alter ego Mr. Hyde and eventually commits murder; kills self; narrated by Mr. Utterson),
Kidnapped (Ebenezer puts nephew David Balfour on ship to Carolinas; David becomes
friends with Jacobite Alan Breck; ship wrecks and they come ashore in Scotland),
Weir of Hermiston (Archie Weir banished by judge father and loves Christina; novel unfinished),
A Child's Garden of Verses (including My Shadow and The Lamplighter)
Rudyard Kipling
The Jungle Book (Mowgli raised by wolves in Indian jungle),
The White Man's Burden,
Kim (Kimball O'Hara raised in Lahore and roams India with Tibet lama; joins English Secret Service),
Captains Courageous (spoiled Harvey Cheyne shipwrecked but rescued by fishing
trawler; must work for his keep, and learns self-reliance of a mariner),
Mandalay,
Recessional (60th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession),
Barrack-Room Ballads (celebrates British soldiers),
The Man Who Was (man kept prisoner by Russians long after Crimean War),
The Man Who Would Be King (white trader Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan take
control of Kafristan but Daniel is killed and Peachey is tortured),
Plain Tales from the Hills (short stories about Anglo-Indian life, including soldiers
Otheris, Learoyd, and Mulvaney),
Soldiers Three (more stories like Plain Tales from the Hills)
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness (1890 Belgian Congo, Congo River: narrator Marlowe searches jungle
for powerful trader Kurtz; tells of exploitation of natives),
Lord Jim (Jim abandons sinking Indian ship Patna, but the 800 Muslims are rescued; he
lives in African trading post Patusan but his white friends betray him and murder Chief
Doramin's son Dain Waris, and he is executed),
The Secret Sharer,
The Outcast of the Islands (Williems given native Aissa in return for throttling Almayer's trade),
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Charles Gould, owner of a silver mine in Costaguana
South America, neglects wife Dona Emilia; during revolution, Gould puts "incorruptible"
foreman Nostromo in charge of some silver; Nostromo buries it and is killed; others include
Dr. Monygham and Paris reporter Martin Decourd),
Almayer's Folly,
The Niger of the Narcissus (black sailor James Wait dies of TB; Donkin tries to stir mutiny),
The Secret Agent (Verloc persuades brother-in-law Stevie to blow up Greenwich
Observatory, which he does and dies; Verloc killed by wife Winnie),
Victory (wanderer Axel Heyst goes to South Seas with Lena; hotel manager Schomberg
loves Lena and sends men to invade Heyst's sanctuary; Lena is killed),
The Secret Sharer (captain takes on board a murderer who is his double),
The Shadow Line (captain grows mature by taking ship through difficult calm),
Typhoon (Captain MacWhirr brings Chinese passengers safely through tempest),
Under Western Eyes (Razumov betrays Haldin, who assassinated an official, becomes
spy in Geneva, loves Haldin's sister Nathalie, confesses to revolutionaries, is beaten,
and is returned to Russia)
Arnold Bennett
Clayhanger (Edwin Clayhanger's father opposes his love for Hilda Lessways, whose husband is bigamous), The Old Wives' Tale (Five Towns: Constance Baines marries
apprentice Samuel Povey and sister Sophia keeps a pension)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Cranford, Mary Barton (Manchester weavers), North and South, Wives and Daughters
Charles Kingsley
Westward Ho, The Water Babies
John Galsworthy
The Forsyte Saga (Irene, wife of wealthy Soames Forsyte, loves architect
Philip Bosinney, but both are punished by Soames; Irene divorces and marries Young Jolyon;
Soames' daughter Fleur loves Irene's son Jon; includes The Man of Property, In Chancery, To
Let), A Modern Comedy, End of the Chapter
HG Wells
The War of the Worlds (Martians invade England but are killed by bacteria; 1938 radio
broadcast in US caused panic),
The Time Machine (inventor visits stages in degeneration of life; ape-like Morlocks eat
aristocratic Eloi; eventually only crabs remain),
The Invisible Man,
Kipps (Arthur Kipps comes into a fortune but only becomes happy when it is embezzled),
The History of Mr. Polly (Mr. Polly burns down his house),
The New Machiavelli,
Tono-Bungay (George Ponderevo apprenticed to druggist uncle Edward who makes
fortune from quack medicine Tono-Bungay; George becomes airplane designer)
AE Housman
A Shropshire Lad (including To an Athlete Dying Young, When I Was One-and-Twenty)
George Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman (Ann Whitefield pursues John Tanner, who talks with superman Don Juan
and the Devil in Hell; others include chauffeur Henry Straker and bandit Mendoza),
Adrocles and the Lion,
Candida (Candida Morell stays with weak Christian Socialist clergyman husband rather
than go with Eugene Marchbanks)
Heartbreak House (WWI England: Ellie Dunn searches for husband among guests at sea
captain's home; guests represent a modern evil; Boss Mangan [capitalist] killed by bomb;
Ellie marries Capt. Shotover),
Saint Joan (Joan of Arc surprised to become saint but offer to return is refused),
Mrs. Warren's Profession (Mrs. Warren admits to daughter Vivie she is a madam),
The Devil's Disciple (American Revolution: Dick Dudgeon allows himself to be
executed in place of Parson Anderson),
Back to Methuselah (5-parts from Garden of Eden to 1920 England to AD 31920),
Pygmalion (phonetics Prof. Henry Higgins teaches Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to
speak like a lady; she loves him),
Cesar and Cleopatra (giddy teenager Cleopatra loses charm under Caesar's tutelage),
Arms and the Man (Bulgaria: mercenary Bluntschli takes Raina from Major Sergius; title
from Aeneid; made into The Chocolate Soldier opera by Oskar Straus),
Major Barbara (Salvation Army major Barbara refuses "tainted" money from armament
company owner Undershaft [her dad] and a whisky dealer but comes to recognize poverty
not sin causes crime),
John Bull's Other Island (Irish Larry Doyle and English Tom Broadbent; Tom gains
Larry's property and girlfriend because he is ambitious and Larry is reticent)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(sprung rhythm) The Windhover, Carrian Comfort, The Wreck of the Deutschland (5 nuns fleeing Germany for US drown off Welsh coast)
Anna Sewell
Black Beauty (kind woman rescues a horse mistreated horse with broken leg)
Bram Stoker
(Irish) Dracula (diary tells of Count Dracula, who feeds on blood of young women, who then
become vampires; Dutch scientist Van Helsing kills the vampire; set in London and Transylvania)
Oscar Wilde - (Irish)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Jack Worthing loves Gwendolen Fairfax but her mom Lady
Bracknell objects until she learns he is actually Ernest John Moncrieff, brother of
Algernon Moncrieff; Jack had created imaginary younger brother Ernest for Cecily
Cardew under tutelage of Miss Prism, who marries Algernon),
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Basil Hallward paints portrait of Dorian Gray, which deteriorates
instead of Dorian as he joins Lord Henry Wotton and sins; Dorian kills Hallward,
stabs picture and dies),
Salome,
Lady Winderemere's Fan (Lady Windermere plans to leave husband for Lord Darlington
because he loves Mrs. Erlynne, who turns out to be her mother, who rescues her
reputation)
Aldous Huxley
Point Counter Point (Philip Quarles [Huxley] writes novel; Mark Rampion [Lawrence]
and wife Mary [Frieda]; Spandrell [Baudelaire] assassinates Everard Webley [Fascist Sir
Oswald Mosley]; Denis Burlap [Murry] and Beatrice Gilray [Mansfeld]),
Brave New World (632 After Ford: John is a savage from NM who believes in moral choice and
commits suicide in new world of collectivism and passivity; title from the Tempest),
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Jo Stoyte CA oil magnate visits 200-year old earl),
Antic Hay (teacher Theodore Gumbril Jr quits to sell pants),
Crome Yellow (Mrs. Wimbush and other eccentrics at a country house party),
Heaven and Hell (effects of drug mescalin)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlett, The Hound of the Baskervilles (English moors: Sherlock Holmes and assistant Dr. Watson investigate death of Sir Charles Baskerville,
involving an apparition and a family curse)
Dame Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient
Express, And Then There Were None (detective Hercule Peroit)
George Orwell
1984 (two rebel against Big Brother [Stalin]), Animal Farm (parody of Russian
Revolution; Jones' farm controlled by pig Napoleon)
Baroness Orczy (born in Hungary)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (Sir Percy Blakeney is actually Scarlet
Pimpernel, rescuer of aristocrats)
John Millington Synge
Playboy of the Western World (Christy Mahon treated as hero when he
thinks he killed his father, but he did not die and opinion is reversed; others include Pegeen)
EM Forster
A Room with a View (Mr. Emerson offers Lucy Honeychurch, who is visiting Italy, his
hotel room since it has a view; Lucy is engaged to Cecil Vyse but overcomes prejudice
and marries George Emerson),
Howards End (rich Wilcoxes, cultured Schlegels, and lower class Leonard Bast live in
Howards End),
A Passage to India (Adela Quested, visiting India with mom Mrs. Moore to see fianc� City
Magistrate Ronny Heaslop, accuses Dr. Aziz of assaulting her in Marabar Caves; liberal
principal Mr. Fielding breaks friendship with Aziz; Adela retracts and Ronny breaks
engagement),
Where Angels Fear to Tread (widow Lilia Herriton goes to Italy and marries Gino Carelli and
dies in childbirth; Gino refuses to let Herritons raise infant in England; Harriet Herriton
abducts and accidentally kills baby),
Aspects of the Novel
CS Forester
The African Queen (missionary's sister and timid Cockney engineer try to blow up a
German gunboat), Horatio Hornblower stories (British navy during Napoleonic Wars)
DH Lawrence
Sons and Lovers (Paul Morel, son of coal miner and educated Puritan, becomes artist and has
affairs with Miriam and Clara Dawes),
Women in Love (sculptor Gudrun Brangwen loves mining industrialist Gerald Crich; her
sister Ursula marries school inspector Rupert Birkin; Gerald refuses Birkin's friendship
and kills self on Tyrol mountains),
Plumed Serpent (Kate Leslie attends Mexican bullfight; Don Ramon and General
Cipriano try to resurrect Aztec religion),
Lady Chatterley's Lover (Constance Chatterley leaves husband Clifford, made impotent
by a war wound, for her gameskeeper Mellors; banned as obscene),
Kangaroo (Australia: Richard Lovat Somers tries to control wife Frieda Lawrence;
political leader Benjamin Cooley nicknamed Kangaroo),
The Man Who Died (The Escaped Cock, Christ resurrects and mates with priestess of Isis),
The Rainbow (Ursula Brangwen loves Polish exile Anton Skrebensky and attracted to
feminist teacher Winifred Inger who marries her uncle),
The Rocking-Horse Winner (small boy rides self to death on toy rocking horse which
prophesies horse race winners),
Things (two American idealists devote lives to art, beauty, Buddhism, and culture but
only collect "things"),
The Woman Who Rode Away (lonely American woman sacrificed by Mexican Indian tribe)
James Joyce
Ulysses (describes June 16, 1904 in the lives of Jewish advertisement canvasser Leopold
Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus; parallels Odysseus, Penelope, and
Telemachus; Leopold and Stephen experience exile)
Finnegans Wake (presents dreams of the Earwicker family, including Protestant tavern-
keeper Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, wife Anna, and kids Isobel, Kevin, and Jerry;
divine, heroic, human, and confusion ages),
Dubliners (short stories of middle-class Catholics who have epiphanies, including Clay [Maria
goes to family party], The Dead [Irish college teacher Gabriel Conroy and wife Gretta at
Christmas dance], and The Sisters [boy confronted with death and learns priest is insane]),
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen Dedalus grows up and leaves Dublin for
Paris to become writer),
Chamber Music (poems)
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa Dalloway prepares to host a party; former love Peter Walsh shows up),
To the Lighthouse (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay host house party; guest Lily Briscoe is an artist;
they plan to take a boat to the lighthouse the next day but son James is disappointed
when weather prevents this; years later, after Mrs. Ramsay's death, Mr. Ramsay takes
James to lighthouse in boat),
Between the Acts (Miss La Trobe directs pageant of English history),
Jacob's Room (Jacob Flanders studies at Cambridge, travels in Greece, dies in WWI) ,
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (attacks Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells),
The Waves (6 kids raised together by sea; reunions with friend Percival in restaurant and
at Hampton Court; storyteller Bernard, perfectionist Neville, vain Australian Louis,
domestic Susan, flirtatious Jinnie, timid Rhoda),
Orlando (Orlando starts as nobleman and becomes woman poet 300 years later),
A Room of One's Own (feminist essay)
James Hilton
Goodbye Mr. Chips (WWI English schoolmaster Mr. Chipping), Lost Horizon (diplomat
Conway visits Shangri-La utopia in Himalayas; woman he takes from there ages rapidly)
W Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage (orphan Philip Carey becomes country doctor and gives up love for
waitress Mildred Rogers but is rescued and marries Sally Altheney),
The Moon and Sixpence (stockbroker Charles Strickland leaves everything to become
painter in Tahiti; based on Paul Gauguin),
Cakes and Ale (Ashenden and Kear [based on Walpole] examine Victorian writer
Driffield, husband of barmaid Rosie),
The Razor's Edge (worldly young man converts to Hinduism),
Miss Thompson (South Sea missionary Alfred Davidson temporarily converts Sadie Thompson)
Russell and Whitehead
Principia Mathematica
Bertrand Russell
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind, An Inquiry
into Meaning and Truth, Has Man a Future?, Unarmed Victory
Alfred Whitehead
Science and the Modern Man
Ford Maddox Ford
The Good Soldier (John Dowell discovers wife Florence is having affair with
"good soldier" Captain Ashburnham, married to Leonora), Parade's End (4 novels: Some Do Not,
No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, The Last Post; Christopher Tietjens changed by WWI
trench warfare; has mental breakdown and leaves wife for Valentine Wannop)
Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett
Brothers and Sisters, Men and Wives, Two Worlds and Their Ways Angry Young Men
Kingsley Amis
Lucky Jim, John Wain
John Braine
Room at the Top
Dylan Thomas (Welsh)
Eighteen Poems, Do not go gentle into that good night, Fern Hill, Altarwise by
owl-light, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Under Milk Wood, Adventures in the Skin Trade
William Golding
Lord of the Flies (British schoolboys crash on uninhabited island; try to form
organized society but revert to savagery), The Inheritors, The Spire, The Paper Men, Pincher
Martin (shipwrecked man struggles to live on barren rock),
William Butler Yeats
The Tower,
The Winding Stair,
The Second Coming (22 lines from Michael Robartes and the Dancer collection),
The Countess Cathleen (Cathleen sells soul to devil for souls of starving Irish;
accompanied by nurse Oona and poet Aleel),
The Herne's Egg (two Irish kings steal eggs of the sacred Great Herne and rape its priestess),
Purgatory (old man and son see his mom's ghost; man kills son),
A Vision
Winston Churchill
A History of the English Speaking Peoples
Malcolm Lowry (expatriate to Mexico)
Under the Volcano (British consul to Mexico Geoffrey
Firmin's wife Yvonne returns to him on Day of the Dead 1938; others include his idealist
half-brother Hugh and her movie director ex-lover Laruelle)
TS Eliot - (American-British)
The Waste Land (5 sections explore psychic stages of a soul in despair; waste land
contrasted with regeneration sources from the past; Medieval waste land ruler
Fisher King cured by purifying knight),
The Hollow Men (mixture of nursery rhyme and liturgy; emptiness of 1900s),
Four Quartets (4 places: Burnt Norton, East Coker, Dry Salvages, Little Gidding),
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (shy Prufrock becomes introspective at a drawing
room party),
Murder in the Cathedral (Thomas Becket martyred at Canterbury on Dec. 29, 1170 by
four knights of Henry II),
The Cocktail Party (host Edward Chamberlayne marries Lavinia but has affair with Celia;
psychiatrist Henry Harcourt-Reilly),
Portrait of a Lady (woman and man trapped by dying social order but can't communicate),
The Family Reunion (Harry Lord Monchensey murders wife and goes to his mom Amy's
birthday party; wise aunt Agatha knows he is seeing the Eumenides, avenging furies),
Tradition and the Individual Talent (poet must know past to write significant poetry)
WH Auden
The Ascent of F6 (with Christopher Isherwood; Michael Ransom climbs mountain in British
Sudoland that kills all by own demons), The Double Man, City Without Walls, The Age of Anxiety
(three men and a woman meet in a NY bar during a war and go on a quest through a wasteland)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of the Rings (including The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The
Return of the King, sequels to The Hobbit; Third Age of Middle Earth: Lord of Darkness Sauron
lost a magical ring which gives absolute power but corrupts its users; Bilbo Baggins recovered
the ring and his nephew Frodo becomes heir; hobbits form a Fellowship to burn the ring at
Mount Doom; Frodo and servant Sam Gamgee try to complete mission; Third Age gives way to
Dominion of Man; sorcerer Gandolph)
C. Day Lewis
The Magnetic Mountain, World Above All, Poetic Image
Arthur Koestler
Darkness at Noon (Nicholas Rubashov is imprisoned by Gletkin and agrees to
his execution to further revolutionary ideal)
Doris Lessing
The Children of Violence (5 novels about Martha Quest, raised in Rhodesia)
CS Lewis
The Screwtape Letters (devil Screwtape advises nephew Wormwood how to deal with
humans), Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion the
Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair,
The Horse and His Boy, The Magician's Nephew, The Last Battle; lion Aslan and 4 children
who enter Narnia through a wardrobe save the country from a witch)
James M. Barrie
Peter Pan (Peter Pan, searching for lost shadow with lost children, saves
Wendy, Michael, and John Darling, from pirates under Capt. Hook; Indian princess Tiger Lily
and fairy Tinker Bell protect kids) , What Every Woman Knows, The Admiral Crichton, Little
Minister, Little Brutus
Harold Pinter
The Birthday Party (Stanley Webber intimidated by Goldberg and McCann),
The Caretaker (Mick entrusts house to brain-damaged brother Aston who likes Davies),
The Collection (gay man has affair),
The Dumbwaiter (two assassins fill meal orders on a dumbwaiter while waiting for
victim; one kills the other)
Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory ("whiskey priest" courageously continues ministry in 1920s Mexico)
Sean O'Casey (Irish, drama)
Juno and the Paycock (Juno Boyle fights war, poverty, and drunkenness; funny but weak husband Paycock)
Samuel Beckett - (Irish, drama)
Waiting for Godot (tramps Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot to come but he never
does; Pozzo mistreats his servant Lucky),
How It Is,
Krapp's Last Tape (Krapp ridicules tapes of his youthful monologues),
Three Novels (Malone Dies, Molloy [cripples searches for his mom; official Moran
searches for the cripple], The Unnamable[narrator lives legless and armless in
large jar outside a restaurant])
Patrick White (1900s)
Happy Valley (scathing analysis of Australian town),
The Tree of Man (dairy farming family),
Voss (man disappears into Australian interior),
The Eye of the Storm (heirs disrupt woman's death),
The Cockatoos,
A Frincge of Leaves,
The Twyborn Affair,
Flaws in the Glass,
Memoirs of Many in One
Maurice Maeterlinck (1800s-1900s)
Pelleas et Melisandre (King Arkel's grandson Golaud
marries Melisandre but she loves his brother Pelleas; Golaud kills Pelleas)
Elias Canetti (1900s)
The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in the Ear, The Tower of Babel
(sinologist Prof. Kien marries housekeeper and discovers horrors in world), Crowds and Power
Margaret Atwood
The Circle Game, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Dancing Girls
Earle Birney
David and Other Poems, Now Is Time, Turvey, Down the Long Table
Compilation Chou Dynasty 1027 BC - 256 BC
Book of Odes (see Han Dynasty)
Ch'u Yuan
Elegies of Ch'u (songs about misfortunes at the court of Ch'u state)
Confucius
(Kung Fu-tse; philosopher c. 500 BC; taught humanity, reverence for ancient sages, and
government by virtue)
Mencius
(second most important Confucian philosopher, c. 300 BC)
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching (81 paragraphs; advocates following the Way, or Tao; established Taoism)
Chuang Chou
Chuang Tzu (Taoist text; includes Butterfly Dream of Chuang Tzu)
Ssu-ma Ch'ien
Shih chi (history)
Five Classics
Book of Odes (Shih ching; 305 songs)
Book of Changes (I ching; Changes of Chou; 64 hexagrams used for fortune-telling;
edited by Confucius)
Book of Rites (Li chi; texts about ritual and behavior)
Book of Documents (Shu ching; history dating to first half of Chou dynasty)
Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch'un ch'iu; chronicle of Lu feudal state 722-481 BC; dry)
Wang Wei
(Buddhist poet) T'ang Dynasty 618-907
Li Po
(Turkic origin; poet; exiled for role in An Lu-shan Rebellion; may have died embracing
moon's reflection; exuberant and unconventional)
Tu Fu
(Confucian scholar; wrote about An Lu-shan Rebellion)
Po Chu-i
The Lute Song, The Song of Everlasting Regret
Four Books
(Chu Hsi established these as texts of education and basis for civil service exams)
Analects (collection of anecdotes and sayings of Confucius; translated by Arthur Waley)
Great Learning (originally a chapter from Book of Rites; emphasizes self-cultivation)
Mean (originally a chapter from Book of Rites; discusses moral concepts)
Mencius (The Book of Master Meng; teachings of Mencius [c. 300 BC])
Lo Kuan-chung
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Outlaws of the Marsh (The Water Margin)
Wu Ch'eng-en
Journey to the West (Buddhist priest Hsuan-tsang, with 3 magic helpers including
a comic monkey, goes to India searching for holy scriptures)
Unknown Yuan Dynasty 1279-1368
The Golden Lotus (story of Hsi-men Ch'ing and his six wives)
Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in
The Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone; autobiographical; describes decline of Chia family)
Hu Shih
(started 1920s literary revolution; studied at Columbia) - China's Place in the Present
World Struggle, Collected Essays
Lu Hsun (doctor)
Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction
Pa Chin
The Family
Lao She
Rickshaw Boy
Gao Xingjian
Soul Mountain, One Man's Bible, Fugitives
Franz Kafka (1900s)
The Trial (bank assessor Joseph K is executed for an unknown crime by mysterious legal
authority),
The Castle (K is unable to enter a castle where he has been summoned to work as a land
surveyor; made school janitor instead),
Amerika (Karl Rossman, a social misfit),
Metamorphesis (Gregor Samsa awakens as a huge insect)
Karel Capek (1900s)
RUR = Rossum's Universal Robots (introduced word robots)
Jaroslav Seifert (1900s)
The Nightingale Sings Badly, Put Out the Lights (about Nazi threat in Prague)
Jaroslav Hasek (1900s)
The Good Soldier (Schweik goes to military prison, goes to insane asylum, interferes in superior's love life, is accused of spying, and goes to Russian front)
Vaclav Havel (1900s)
The Garden Party
Hans Christian Anderson (1800s)
The Improvisatore or Life in Italy, The Ugly Duckling, The
Emperor's New Clothes, Little Mermaid
Isak Denison (Karen Blixen, 1800s - 1900s)
Out of Africa, Seven Gothic Tales
Karl Gjellerup (1800s-1900s)
Richard Wagner in His Chief Work, The Pilgrim Kamanoto
Henrik Pontoppidan (1800s-1900s)
Emanuel or Children of the Soul, The Promised Land, Does Rige
Johannes Jensen (1900s)
The Long Journey (evolution of man), The Fall of the King
Louis Couperus (1900s)
The Book of the Small Souls (Van Lowes spend Sundays at Granny's)
Naguib Mahfouz (1900s)
The Cairo Trilogy, The Children of Gebelawi
Elias Lonnrott (1800s)
Kalevala (national epic; origin of world; adventures of Kaleva's sons Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkainen)
Frans Eemil Sillanpaa (1900s)
Meek Heritage, Fallen Asleep While Young
Chanson de Roland
(Charlemagne follows Ganelon's advice to negotiate with Saracen leader
Marsile about Saragossa; 400000 Saracens ambush 20000 rear guard under Charlemagne's
nephew Roland [Hruotland of Brittany] at pass of Roncesvalles; despite Olivier's pleas
Roland does not sound ivory horn to summon rest of army until only 60 remain; blessed by
Archbishop Turpin; Roland's fianc�e Aude dies; Ganelon quartered; written 1100, part of the
Cycle de France)
Romance of the Rose
(Lover tries to pick a rosebud)
Francois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel (giant Gargantua's son Pantagruel accompanies
Panurge on quest to decide if he should marry; eventually reach Oracle of the Holy Bottle at
Cathay, where the oracle answers "Drink!", meaning all must solve own problems)
Michael de Montaigne
(humanist, "invented" essays) Essais, Apology for Raymond Sebond (Spaniard's attempt to prove God exists)
Pierre Corneille
Le Cid
Jean Baptiste Racine
Berenice (Emperor Titus doesn't marry Berenice of Palestine because the people object),
Phedre (Theseus's wife Phaedra loves stepson Hippolyte who repulses her but nurse
Oenone says Hippolyte made advances and Theseus calls Neptune to destroy his son;
Hippolyte loves Aricie),
Esther (Esther adopted by Mordecai and replaced Vashti as Ahasuerus's wife; she saved
Israelites from Haman's plot, who was hanged on gallows he built for Mordecai),
Mithridate (Mithridate loves Greek Monime but his son Pharnaces tries to marry her, but
she loves his other son Xiphares; Pharnaces refuses to marry princess of Parthia;
Xiphares defeats Romans under Pharnaces),
Bajazet (1638 Constantinople: sultana Roxane allows Bajazet to be executed when she
learns he loves Atalide; Roxane is executed and Atalide commits suicide),
Britannicus (Nero poisons Britannicus, his half brother, because he loves Junia),
Les Plaideurs (magistrate Dandin locked up by son but hears cases from attic windows;
condemns his dog for eating a chicken),
Iphigenie in Aulide (Agamemnon plans to sacrifice daughter Iphigenia to get good winds
in harbor but slave-girl Eriphile sacrificed instead)
Moliere
Les precieuses ridicules,
Tartuffe (religious hypocrite Tartuffe gets Orgon to deed him his home and give him his
daughter, but Orgon's wife tricks him into seducing her while Orgon is watching, and
he kicks him out, although Tartuffe owns house and king must intervene),
Le misanthrope (Alceste vows to be honest; loves vain Celimene; loses court case and
abandons society),
The Bourgois Gentleman (France under Louis XIV: Monsieur Jourdain tries to make
himself a gentleman, being fleeced by nobleman Dorannte, and forbids daughter's
marriage to Cleonte),
The Miser,
Les Femmes savantes (Philaminte wants daughter Henriette to marry Trissotin but she
loves Clitandre; Armande likes science; Belise thinks all love her),
Le Malade imaginaire (hypochondriac Argan victimized by doctors Purgon and Difoirus;
wants daughter to marry Diafoirus's son)
Blaise Pascal
Pensees
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)
English or Philosophical Letters (attack church),
Candide (Candide's tutor Pangloss says "All is for the best in this best of all possible
worlds"; Candide loves Cunegonde; the three have many disastrous adventures,
including 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Inquisition, and pirates),
Brutus,
Zaire,
La Henriade (assassination of Henry III and struggle of Henry of Navarre to obtain throne)
Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, Julie or the New Eloise
Charles de Montesquieu
The Spirit of the Laws (favors constitutional monarchy)
Marquis de Sade
Justine The Misfortunes of Virtue (Justine vexes men and suffers; her sister is happy prostitute)
Victor Hugo
Hernani,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris: gypsy dancer Esmeralda loves Captain Phoebus;
evil archdeacon Claude Frollo denounces Esmeralda as a witch; deformed bell ringer
Quasimodo saves Esmeralda but she is later executed and he kills Claude),
Les Miserable (Jean Valjean sentenced to 5 years for stealing bread and 19 for escaping;
released and becomes M. Madeleine but sent back to prison by Javert; befriends
Fantine and rescues her daughter Cosette)
Alexandr Dumas the Elder
The Three Musketeers (1625-1665 France: D'Artagnan, a Gascon, arrives in Paris on
pony and wants to be a guradsman for Louis XIII; he duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis,
and is welcomed into fellowship of Three Muskateers; many exploits; battle Cardinal
Richelieu; sequels Twenty Years After and The Viscount of Bragelonne),
The Count of Monte Cristo (Restoration France: Edmond Dantes falsely accused and
imprisoned; flees to Monte Cristo),
The Black Tulip (1600s Holland political rivalry)
Alexandr Dumas the Younger
Camilla (Paris: Marguerite Gautier, Armand Duval)
Honore de Balzac
The Human Comedy (includes The Wild Ass's Skin [Raphael gets skin that grants wishes but makes the owner grow smaller], Cousin Bette [Lisbeth Fischer destroys her
niece's romance], The Country Doctor [kind Dr. Benassis], Le Pere Goriot [Pere Goriot sacrifices
for ungrateful daughters Nucigen and Restaud])
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary (Emma Bovary is unsatisfied with stupid doctor husband; she
has affairs, incurs debts, and commits suicide), Salammbo (history of Carthage), A Simple Heart
(portrays life of widow Mme Aubain's servant Felicite)
Emile Zola
The Dram Shop,
Earth,
Les Rougon-Macquart (20 novels about Rougon-Macquart family in Second Empire;
includes Nana [Gervaise's daughter Nana becomes prostitute], Germinal [coal workers
Etienne Lantier and the Meheu family strike in 1884], L'Assommoir, and La Terre)
J'accuse (open letter to French President in Aurore denouncing Dreyfus affair, who was
pardoned by the Cour de Cassation when Major Esterhazy was found guilty)
Edmund Rostand
Cyrano de Bergerac (soldier Cyrano fears his long nose will deter Roxane; he confesses his love for her before dying)
Jules Verne
Around the World in 80 Days (Phileas Fogg and Passepartout win bet),
20000 Leagues Under the Sea (Nautilus submarine, under Captain Nemo, picks up
shipwrecked Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and harpoonist Ned Land),
Journey to the Center of the Earth,
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Stendhal
The Red and the Black (Julien Sorel), The Charterhouse of Parma (Fabrizio del Dongo)
Guy de Maupassant
The Necklace, The Umbrella, En Famille, Le Rendezvous, Une Vie, Bel-Ami, Pierre et Jean
Sully Prudhomme
The Destinies, The Empty Endearments, Happiness
Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard, The
Mother-of-Pearl Box, Penguin Island (Breton monk Saint Mael baptizes penguins and
tows island back to shore), Thais (Alexandrian monk Paphnutius converts and loves Thais)
Albert Camus (French-Algerian)
The Fall (former Paris lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence owns bar in Amsterdam; judge-penitent
regrets not saving girl on bridge; speaks to Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb),
The Plague (Algerian port Oran overcome by plague; Doctor Bernard Rieux does his best),
The Stranger (Meursault has affair with Marie, kills an Arab, and is executed),
The Myth of Sisyphus (essay on theory of the absurd),
Caligula,
The Rebel (essay on theory of the absurd)
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
Romain Rolland
Jean Christophe (novel series about German musician Jean Christophe Kraft who travels and criticizes civilization)
Henri Bergson
Creative Evolution, The Creative Mind, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Laughter
Roger Martin du Gard
Les Thibaults (dutiful Antoine and rebellious brother Jacques Thibault die in WWI), The Postman
Andre Gide
The Fruits of the Earth (poems),
The Immoralist (Michel marries Marceline and gets TB in North Africa; he likes young
Arab boys; friend Menalque tells him to follow passions; Marceline gets TB and dies),
Strait Is the Gate (Jerome woos cousin Alissa but she wants to sacrifice her happiness to God),
Lafcadio's Adventures (The Vatican Cellars; swindler extorts money by claiming pope
was kidnapped; Lafcadio kills one of three brothers-in-law),
The Counterfeiters (boys Bernard Profitendieu and Oliveier Molinier try to befriend
novelist Edouard),
The Pastoral Symphony (Swiss pastor adopts and loves blind orphan Gertrude who might
love Jacques; her sight is restored and she commits suicide)
Francois Mauriac
Therese Desqueyroux (Therese Desqueyroux poisons husband but is
acquitted), Genitrix, A Woman of the Pharisees, The Desert of Love, Vipers' Tangle, The Kiss to
the Leper, Life of Jesus, The Son of Man, Asmodee
St.-John Perse
Seamarks, Exile, Rains, Winds
Claude Simon
The Wind, The Grass, The Flanders (3 soldiers recall fall of France), The Palace (Loyalist Frenchman in Spanish Civil War), Historie
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past (contrasting Meseglise Way and Guermantes Way
in Faubourg St. Germain; Swann's daughter marries a Guermantes; Swann's Way, Within a
Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone,
The Past Recaptured), Jean Santeuil
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness ("an essay on phenomenological ontology"; existentialism),
No Exit (3 dead people locked in room),
Les Temps Modernes,
Dirty Hands (Proletarian Party sends Hugo to kill Hoederer, whom he sees kissing his
wife Jessica; Hugo kills him but then feels there was no reason),
The Respectful Prostitute (senator's son Fred gets Lizzie to testify against innocent black
as scapegoat for cousin Thomas),
Nausea (historian Roquentin and wife Anny feel there is no reason for existing),
The Flies (based on Orestes),
The Wall (short stories, including The Wall [Spanish Civil War prisoner lies about
location of his leader, but leader moves and he is correct]),
The Roads to Freedom (3 novels: The Age of Reason [Mathieu], The Reprieve [Sept.
1938 Munich Pact], Troubled Sleep [1940 fall of France])
Lay of Hildebrand epic
(Hildebrand, follower of Theodoric the Great, tries to stop combat with son Hadubrand)
Middle High German Period 1100-1370
King Rother epic
The Nibelungenlied
(Hagen tells Burgundian kings about Siegfried, who helps Gunther court Iceland Queen Brunhild in exchange for marrying his sister Kriemhild)
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Parzival (guileless fool Parzival leaves wife Kondwiramur visits castle of Holy Grail , asks questions which cure Amfortas and becomes king of the Grail)
Thomas a Kempis
Imitation of Christ
Gudrun
(Hetel courts Irish King Hagen's daughter Hilde)
Sebastian Brant
Ship of Fools
Johann Gottfried von Herder
philosopher of Sturm und Drang movement
Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
Sturm und Drang play
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gotz von Berlichingen (1500s peasant revolt),
The Sorrows of Young Werther (artistic, talented Werther loves Lotte who marries
steadier man; Werther shoots himself),
Faust,
Iphigenia in Tauris (Orestes goes to Tauris to rescue statue of Artemis, which Apollo said
would cure Orestes' madness; high priestess Iphigenia recognizes brother and they
escape),
Reineke Fuchs (Reynard the Fox outwits Isengrim the wolf, King Noble the lion, Sir
Bruin the bear, Tibert the cat, Chanticleer the cock),
Torquato Tasso (based on 1500s Italian poet)
Friedrich von Schiller
William Tell (William Tell is forced to shoot apple off son's head by Gebler because he
had not saluted Austrian hat on a pole),
Kabale und Liebe (love of musician's daughter Luise Miller and aristocrat Ferdinand von
Walther opposed by his dad),
Mary Stuart,
On Na�ve and Sentimental Poetry,
The Robbers (brother cheats Karl Moor out of inheritance, and he forms band of robbers
but eventually turns himself in)
Immanuel Kant
(idealist classical philosopher) Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Grimm's Fairy Tales (Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and
Rumpelstiltskin)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra
Rainer Maria Rilke
Dinggedichte, The Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus
Theodor Mommsen
Romische Geschichte (history of Rome)
Gerhart Hauptmann
The Weavers (based on 1844 Silesian weavers rebellion),
Drayman Henschel (man promises to be faithful to wife's memory but trapped into
marrying housekeeper),
The Sunken Bell (bell-maker Heinrich's bell falls into lake and he leaves family for sprite
Rautendelein),
Rose Bernd (Rose is engaged to August Kiel but has child by town magistrate and kills it
and is arrested)
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain (Hans Castorp visits Joachim Ziemssen in Haus Berghof TB
sanatorium in Swiss Alps and decides to stay; active Dr. Behrens, Settembrinin, and
Peeperkorn vs. decadent Leo Naphta and Dr. Krokowski; sees vision of temple with
two hags; leaves in 1914 but WWI has begun),
Death in Venice (aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach gazes on beauty of 14-year-old
Tadzio; choleric epidemic hits Venice),
Buddenbrooks (Christian and Thomas fail to maintain the estate of their grandfather Johann),
Mario and the Magician (waiter Mario shoots magician Cippla who humiliated him in trance),
The Beloved Returns (Charlotte Buff visits Goethe),
Doktor Faustus (collapse of composer Adrian Leverkuhn parallels German collapse in
WWII, narrated by Serenus Zeitblom),
Joseph and His Brothers (4-novel Bildungroman based on Joseph in Genesis),
Tonio Kroger (Tonio Kroger is ridiculed by schoolmates; unrequited loves for Hans
Hansen and Ingeborg Holm; becomes famous writer)
Bertolt Brecht
Mother Courage and Her Children (Mother Courage sells trifles to soldiers during
Thirty Years War; her 3 kids die),
The Threepenny Opera (Polly Peachum marries robber Macheath; music by Kurt Weill),
The Life of Galileo,
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (city founded by pleasure-seekers collapses)
Erich Maria Remarque (later moved to US)
All Quiet on the Western Front (WWI German trenches)
Hans Sachs
The Nightingale of Wittenberg (about Martin Luther), Epitaphium
Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum (hunchback Oskar Matzerath recollects events in Danzig during
Hitler era; beats drum to relieve anger), The Flounder (4000 years of women in history; narrator
married to cook Ilsebill), Cat and Mouse
Heinrich Boll
The Clown (Hans Schnier and Marie show audiences their follies through
pantomimes; Marie leaves him), Traveller If You Come to Spa, Adam Where Art Thou, Billiards
at Half-Past Nine
George Seferis (1900s)
Turning Point, In the Manner of GS, Helen, Against Whitethorns
Odysseus Elytis (1900s)
The Axion Esti of Odysseus Elytis, Six and One Regrets for the Sky
Halldor Kiljan Laxness (1900s)
Under the Holy Mountain, The Great Weaver from Kashmir,
The Book of the Pieople, Paradise Reclaimed, Christianity at the Glacier)
Seamus Heaney (1900s)
Death of a Naturalist, Door Into the Dark
Rabindranath Tagore
Ravindrasangeet (poems set to music), The Gardner, Fireflies, Red Oleanders, Gitanjali, The Golden Boat
Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children (Shiva and Saleem, 2 of 1001 born in hour after independence August 15 1947), Satanic Verses, Grimus (American Indian), Shame (based on Bhutto and Zia
in Pakistan), Gulliver's Travels Tristram Shandy and The Jaguar Smile (Nicaragua revolution)
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
The Bridal Canopy, Days of Awe, A Guest for the Night
Petrarch (1300s)
On Illustrious Men, Africa (hero Scipio Africanus; Masinissa loves Sophonisba), Secretum (love for Laura), Rime, Trionfi, De remediis
Giovanni Boccaccio (1300s)
The Decameron (1348 Florence: 10 noblemen, 100 stories,
including Calandrino and the Heliotrope [Calandrino thinks he has found a stone that can make
him invisible]), Il Filocolo (travails of Florio and Biancofiore, including Thirteen Questions of
Love digression), Il Filostrato (Trojan Troliolo loves Criseida and is helped by Pandaro)
Dante Alighieri (1300s)
The Divine Comedy (Vergil takes Dante on tour of Hell on Good Friday
1300; Beatrice takes Dante from Purgatory to Paradise; Inferno: anteroom for those who
did no good or bad, 9 levels: Limbo for unbaptized but blameless, Paolo and Francesca carnal
sinners, City of Dis torments of heretics, worst for Brutus, Cassius, and Judas; Purgatorio: Vergil
guides Dante up mountain where people are cleansed from sins, Matilda conducts Dante to Edenlike
garden where Beatrice takes over as guide; Paradiso: 8 heaves of the planets, ninth heaven Primum
Mobile with 9 orders of angels, radiant Empyrean River, St. Bernard replaces Beatrice as guide)
Matteo Maria Boiardo (1400s)
Orlando Innamorato (Angelica sows discord among Charlemagne's paladins)
Lodovico Ariosto (1500s)
Orlando Furiosos (Charlemagne entrusts Angelica to Duke Namo; rescued by Ruggiero)
Niccolo Machiavelli (1500s)
The Prince (model prince Cesare borgia, son of Alexander VI),
Collodi (Crlo Lorenzini, 1800s)
Pinocchio (puppet comes to life; nose grows when he lies)
Giosue Carducci (1800s)
The Hymn to Satan, Juvenilia
Grazia Deledda (1900s)
Elias Portulu, Ashes, The Mother
Salvatore Quasimodo (1900s)
To Give and to Have
Ignazio Silone (1900s)
Bread and Wine (Communist hero Pietro Spina disguises self as priest; anti-Fascist; old priest Don Benedetto)
Eugenio Montale (1900s)
Cuttlefish Bones, The Butterfly of Dinard, Occasions
Luigi Pirandello (1900s)
Six Characters in Search of an Author (six persons demand they be permitted to perform the drama implied in their lives)
Dario Fo (1900s)
Comic Mysteries, Accidental Death of an Anarchist
Compilation Nara Period 710-794
Man' Yoshu (anthology of 4500 poems)
Lady Murasaki
Tale of Genji (describes Prince Genji and the women he loves, including Murasaki; translated by Arthur Waley)
Sei Shonagon
The Tosa Diary (The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon; diary of a lady-in-waiting in late 900s empress's court)
Kamo no Chomei
An Account of My Hut (Buddhist; describes natural disasters at Kyoto)
The Tales of the Heike
(epic about rise of Taira or Heike family in late 1100s and their defeat by the rival Minamotos)
Noh drama
(elaborate masks and costumes; Buddhist; deals with famous historical themes)
Zeami Motokiyo
Atsumori, The Robe of Feathers, Birds of Sorrow
Ihara Saikaku
The Life of an Amorous Man, Five Women Who Loved Love, Worldly Mental Calculatio
Bunraku theater
(plays with 3-foot lifelike puppets)
Kabuki theater
(all-male historical or domestic dramas; lines spoken by narrators not actors)
Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Battles of Coxinga, Love Suicde
at Amijima
Joruri songs
(chanted narration of tales)
Haiku
(3 lines 5-7-5 syllables; contrast with tanka, 5 lines 5-7-5-7-7 syllables)
Matsuo Basho
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel
Kawabata Yasunari
The Izu Dancer, Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, The Sound of the Mountain, Beauty and Sadness
Oe Kenzaburo
The Catch, Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids, Hiroshima Notes, The Silent Cry
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Weep Not Child (Njoroge Ngotho deals with Mau-Mau uprising), A Grain of Wheat (Kenyan independence Mau-Mau uprising), The River Between
Alfonso de Ercilla y Zuniga (Spanish/Chilean)
La Araucana (about Spain's conquest of Chile)
Juana Ines de la Cruz (Mexico)
First Dream, A Woman of Genius
Jose Hernandez (Argentina)
Martin Fierro (Martin Fierro tells of life as gaucho and flight with friend Cruz into Indian territory)
Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi (Mexico)
El periquillo sarniento
Jorge Isaacs (Columbia)
Maria (romance novel)
Jose Marti (Cuba)
Free Verses, Whitman, Emerson, Our America, Bolivar, Inside the Monster, Our Education
Julian del Casal
(Cuba, Parnassian) Nineteenth Century
Jose Maria Heredia (Cuba/France)
Ode to Niagara
Ruben Dario (Nicaragua)
Azul, Prosas profanas, Cantos de vida y esperanza
Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1971 Nobel)
Canto general, Twenty Love Poems, Residencia en la tierra,
Anillos, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Elemental Odes
Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1945 Nobel)
Sonnets of Death, Desolation, Tenderness, Destruction,
The Wine Press
Octavio Paz (Mexico)
The Labyrinth of Solitude (Spanish conquest made Mexico become isolated and obscured by masks), Early Poems, Selected Poems
Ricardo Guiraldes (Argentina)
Don Segundo Sombra (boy goes on odyssey with ranch worker Don Segundo Sombra and learns gaucho code of honor)
Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967 Nobel)
El senor presidente
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbia, 1982 Nobel)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (recounts seven generations of Buendias family, which founded isolated Macondo [based on Aracataca]), Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Manuel Ugarte (Argentina, militant)
The Future of Latin America, The Destiny of a Continent
Federico Gamboa (Mexico)
Santa
Mariano Azuela (Mexico)
Los de abajo (about Mexican Revolution)
Manuel Puig (Argentina)
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, ultraismo)
Ficciones (stories, many including labyrinths; includes
El Aleph)
Isabel Allende
(Chile) Twentieth Century
Laura Esquivel (Mexico)
Like Water for Chocolate
Carlos Fuentes
The Death of Artemio Cruz (Mexican political boss), The Old Gringo, Christopher Unborn, The Campaign
Derek Walcott (St. Lucia, 1992 Nobel)
Another Life, Dream on Monkey Mountain, Ti-Jean and
His Brothers, Odyssey
Katherine Mansfield (1900s)
Bliss (Bertha Young is happy until she learns husband is unfaithful),
A Dill Pickle (woman meets former lover in restaurant; rediscovers his charm and then
his faults),
The Garden Party (Laura takes leftover cakes to family of poor worker killed setting up
for her family's party),
The Dove's Nest
R.A.K. Mason
New Zealand poet Penrose, Auckland
Hugh Walpole (1900s, moved to England)
Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (at English boarding school,
Mr. Perrin tries to murder rival teacher Mr. Traill), The Herries Chronicle (novel series set in Lake
District; Rogue Herries, Juith Paris, The Fortress, Vanessa)
Frank Sargeson
That Summer, Conversation with My Uncle, A Man and His Wife, Joy of the Worm
Cyprian Ekwensi (1900s)
People of the City (crime reporter and band leader Amusa Sango)
Wole Soyinka (1900s, 1986 Nobel)
(plays) The Swamp Dwellers, Death and the King's Horseman, A Play of Giants, (poetry) Shuttle in the Crypt, (fiction) The Interpreters, Season of Anatomy, (memoirs)
Ake, Isara, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal History of the Nigerian Crisis
Henrik Ibsen (1800s)
A Doll's House (Nora Helmer commits forgery to save banker husband Torvald's life; she realizes
he views her as a doll and leaves him; contrasted with Krogstad and Kristine Linde),
Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gobler steals book from Eilert Lovberg, who had been reformed
by wife Thea Elvsted and became rival of Hedda's husband for professorship, and gives
him a gun to commit suicide; Judge Brack extorts Hedda and she commits suicide; selfless
Miss Juliana Tesman),
Ghosts (widow Helene Alving tells Paster Manders that she will open an orphanage in
memory of her late drunken husband; son Oswald is dying of hereditary syphilis),
Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt ships missionaries and idols to China, makes and loses money, saves his life
at expense of another in shipwreck; Button Molder tries to melt him in his ladle, but is
rescued by Soveig; Great Boyg tries to eat him; he marries Troll King's daughter),
Brand,
When We Dead Awaken (sculptor Rubek meets his model Irene; she says they have both
been dead for years; they go into wild mountains and are swallowed in storm),
Rosmersholm (Rebecca West gets Johannes Rosmer's wife Beata to commit suicide so he
can marry her; Johannes and Rebecca leap into millrace and die)
John Gabriel Borkman (Borkman broke engagement to Ella Rentheim because of Hinkel
whose help he needed; married Ella's sister; jailed for misuse of bank money),
An Enemy of the People (Dr. Stockman wants to close tourist spa for repairs),
The Master Builder (architect Halvard Soness, married to Aline, fears new generation of
architects; Hilde Wanger inspires him to try to build a castle in the sky but he dies),
The Wild Duck (schoolfriend idealist Gregers Werle tries to free photographer Hjalmar
Ekdal from illusions; Hjalmar rejects daughter Hedvig believing she is not his; Gregers
tells Hedvig her dad will accept her if she sacrifices her beloved wild duck but she shoots
self instead)
Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1800s-1900s)
Trust and Trial, Arne, A Happy Boy, Sigurd the Bastard
trilogy, The Editor, The Bankrupt, Beyond Our Power, In God's Way
Sigrid Undset (1800s-1900s)
Kristin Lavransdatter (about a woman's life in 1200s and 1300s Catholic Norway), Saga of Saints, The Snake Pit, In the Wilderness
Knut Hamsun (1800s-1900s)
The Growth of the Soil, Hunger, Pan, Mysteries
Omar Khayyam (1100s)
The Rubaiyat (translated by Edward FitzGerald; 1200 quatrains)
Collected stories (1300s - 1500s, Persian/Indian/Arabic)
The Arabian Nights: The Thousand and
One Nights (King Schahriah marries and kills new woman each night, Scheherazade tells "to be
continued" story each night to keep king from killing her; includes
The History of Aladdin [Aladdin, son of Chinese tailor Mustafa, given lamp with two
genii by African magician who shuts him in cave; Aladdin gets wealth and marries
sultan's daughter Badroulboudour],
The History of Sinbad the Sailor [Baghdad merchant Sinbad describes 7 voyages to
porter Hindbad; mistakes whale for island; gets diamonds from Roc's eggs; meets
Cyclops; burned alive; kills Old Man of the Sea; visits Serendip; sold into slavery
and shoots elephants from trees],
The History of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves [woodcutter Ali Baba sees robbers open
cave by saying "Open Sesame" and gets treasure; thieves kill his brother Cassim
who forgets secret words; Ali's slave Morgiana kills band of thieves with boiling
oil]; English translation by Sir Richard Burton 1888)
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1800s-1900s)
Quo Vadis? (historical novel about first Christians in ancient
Rome), With Fire and Sword (history of Poland 1648-1699; war with Ukrain; King John III), The
Teutonic Knights, Portrait of America
Wladyslaw Reymont (1900s)
The Peasants, The Comedienne, The Promised Land, Rok
Czeslaw Milosz (1900s)
The Captive Mind, Native Realm, The Usurpers, The Issa Valley, The Witness of Poetry, The Land of Ulro, Bells in Winter, History of Polish Literature
Wislawa Szymborska (1900s)
That's Why We're Alive, View with a Grain of Sand
Jose Saramago (1900s)
Baltasar and Blimunda, The Stone Raft, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Eugene Ionesco
The Bald Soprano (antiplay; nameless characters repeat empty gestures), Rhinoceros (man fears remaining human as fellow citizens become rhinos), The Chairs
Twelfth Century Russian Unknown
The Igor Tale (Russian prince battles Polovtsy tribes in 1185)
Aleksandr Pushkin
Boris Godunov (1598-1605 Russia: Czar Boris Godunov kills Dmitry, the crown prince),
Eugene Onegin,
The Captain's Daughter,
Tales of Belkin (includes The Stationmaster story),
The Bronze Horseman (flood kills fianc�e of Yevgeny and he blames Peter the Great),
Little Tragedies (4 dramas: The Stone Guest, Mozart and Salieri, The Covetous Knight,
The Feast during the Plague Year)
Nikolay Gogol
The Overcoat (St. Petersburg: civil servant Akaky Akakyevich Bashmachkin loves
copying documents; buys new coat and gains status but coat is stolen and he dies),
The Government Inspector (Russian town: Khlestakov impersonates inspector but
escapes before being discovered by postman),
Dead Souls (Pavel Chickhkov buys serfs who have died since last census and mortgages
them for land; landowners include Manilov, Sobakevich, Korobochka, and Plyushkin)
Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons (nihilist Bazarov opposes aristocrat Pavel Kirsanov),
A Month in the Country (Natalia and her ward Vera love her son's tutor),
A Nest of the Gentlefolk (Fyodor Lavretsky's presumed-dead wife returns as he is about
to marry Liza Kalitina),
On the Eve (Elena Stakhova scorns scholar Bersenev, sculptor Shubin, and civil servant
Kurnatovsky but loves Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov),
Rudin (Dmitry Rudin talks brilliantly but does not take action; frightened by love of
Natalya Alekseyevna; shot during 1848 Paris revolt),
Smoke (Litvinov loves Tanya but is distracted by old lover Irina),
A Sportsman's Sketches (short stories about life on feudal estates in Russia),
Virgin Soil (student Nezhdanov and Marianna join revolution but he realizes he is not
fitted for it and kills self; she marries Solomin who works for democratic Russia)
Count Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace (1805-1820; Napoleon invades Russia 1812; Natasha Rostova is engaged
to Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, who struggles to find meaning of life through intellect and
calmly accepts death, but marries rake Anatol Kuragin; after war, Natasha marries Pierre
Bezukhov, who finds peace in living under wisdom of peasant Karatayev),
Anna Kerenina (Anna Kerenina leaves husband and child for Count Aleksei Vronsky,
then commits suicide by jumping under a train; Konstantin and Kitty Levin have a
happy marriage),
The Power of Darkness (Nikita seduces Marina, poisons Peter, marries his wife Anisya,
seduces Anisya's stepdaughter Akulina, and kills their baby),
Resurrection (Prince Nekhlyudov seduced Katyusha Maslova; she became prostitute and
poisoned a man; he serves on jury and marries her since he feels guilty but she refuses),
A Confession,
What Is Art? (should be simple enough for all to understand),
The Cossacks (Olenin tries to find happiness among wild Cossacks of the Caucasus;
Maryana and Eroshka),
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (man with cancer ponders death),
Sevastopol Stories (3 stories about Crimean War siege in December, May, and August 1855)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment (St. Petersburg: Raskolnikov murders old pawnbroker and her
sister; his motives are proven false by his conscience; turns to prostitute Sonya
Marmeladovna, who convinces him to confess to policeman Porfiry Petrovich;
Raskolnikov and Sonya go to Sibera),
The Idiot (Prince Mishkin pities Nastasya Filipovna, whom Rogozhin loves; Mishkin proposes
to Aglaya Epanchin; Rogozhin tries to murder Mishkin and does kill Natasya),
The Possessed (spiritual nihilist Nikolay Stavrogin commits crimes and infects Shatov
and Kirilov with ideas he does not believe; Lizaveta Nikolayevna loves Stavrogin
but he marries cripple Marya Lebyadkin; Pyotr Verkhoven tries to get Stavrogin to
join revolution; Verkhovensky murders Shatov),
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and son Dmitri compete for Grushenka;
Fyodor is murdered; Dmitri [passionate] brought to trial; Ivan [intellectual] feels guilty,
Alyosha [mystical] introduces Zosima; Smerdyakov [bastard]; Ivan tells Alyosha The
Legend of the Grand Inquisitor parable [Jesus is arrested by Inquisition in Seville]),
The Double (government clerk Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin driven mad when another
Golyadkin appears and succeeds as he had yearned to; helped by servant Petrushka),
Notes from the Underground (recounts adventures of author's life),
A Diary of a Writer (includes The Meek One and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man stories),
The Raw Youth (Versilov's illegitimate son Arkady goes to St. Petersburg but learns his dad is
his rival for Katerina Akhmatovo; Arkady gets brain fever and is visited by pilgrim Makar
Dolgoruky; Arkady abandons plan to become Rothshild and make money to get power),
The Insulted and Injured (Vanya loves Natasha Ikhmeneva but helps her woo Alyosha Valkovsky;
Ivan and Prince Valkovsky debate philosophy; Dickens character Nelly appears),
The Friend of the Family (Foma Opsikin rules household by playing on master's guilt),
The Gambler (Aleksey Ivanovich has gambling weakness; Polina based on Dostoyevsky's lover),
Poor Folk (drunk clerk Makar Devushkin loves Varvara Dobroselova but she marries
wealthy landlord),
The Eternal Husband (Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky torments wife's ex-lover Aleksey
Ivanovich Velchaninov and mistreats his girl)
Ivan Goncharov
Oblomov
Anton Chekhov
The Sea Gull (writer Konstantin Trepliov loves actress Nina Zarechnaya; his play is a
failure and she takes interest in writer Trigorin, lover of Trepliov's mom Irina Arkadina;
Trepliov kills gull and places it at Nina's feet; Trigorin becomes good writer and Nina is
cast away by Trigorin; Trepliov kills self),
Uncle Vanya Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts (Ivan Voinitsky [Uncle Vanya]
manages estate of brother-in-law Prof. Aleksandr Serebryakov, who he learns is
somewhat a fraud; Vanya loves Serebryakov's second wife Elena Andreyevna;
Serebryakov agrees not to sell the estate Vanya has worked so hard for after he tries
to shoot him),
Three Sisters (Andrey Prozorov wants to be professor but wife Natalya Ivanovna
becomes despotic; sister Masha marries schoolmaster Kulygin but has affair with officer
Vershinin, who moves away; youngest sister Irina marries officer Baron Tuzenbakh who
is killed in a duel; other sister is Olga; all want to go to Moscow),
The Cherry Orchard (Ranevsky family estate sold at auction to Lopakhin who builds
houses on it),
A Dreary Story (Prof. Nikolay Stepanovich and ward Katya review their aimless lives but
cannot communicate to each other),
My Life (Poleznev becomes a laborer),
Peasants (long story about somber peasant life),
Ward No. 6 (mental hospital head Dr. Andrey Ragin withdraws into private study and
alcohol, neglecting patients, except for conversations with Ivan Gromov, and is himself
committed and experiences the maltreatment he allowed the patients to undergo)
Maksim Gorki
The Lower Depths (Kostylev owns a flophouse for indigents, talks with wife
Vasillissa, thief Vaska Pepel, Natasha, truth-seer Satin, and tramp Luka), Mother (Pelageya Nilovna
becomes involved in Russian Revolution with son Pavel Vlasov), Klim Samgin
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivalgo (Russian Revolution: Doctor Yury Zhivalgo likes writing; denounces Marxism to uncle Kolya, mistress Lara)
Leonid Leonov
The Badgers, The Thief (civil war veteran Mitka Vekshin becomes thief during time of New Economic Policy)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ivan Denisovich survives a day in a Soviet labor camp),
The First Circle (Nerzhin [like Solzhenitsyn] is inmate in sharashka prison where educated people
continue research; Lev Rubin [like Lev Kopelev] maintains faith in Communism),
Cancer Ward (Kostoglotov and others come to terms with death),
The Gulag Archipelago (acronym for Soviet Chief Administration of Corrective
Labor Camps; literary investigation of prison camps 1918-1956)
Ivan Bunin
The Village, Dry Valley, The Gentleman from San Francisco
Mikhail Sholokhov
The Quiet Don (Cossack Gregor Melekhov is indecisive about Russian Revolution;
Ivan Bunchuk fights with Bolsheviks but is killed by Melekhov), Virgin Soil Upturned
Joseph Brodsky
A Halt in the Wilderness, The End of a Lovely Era
Alan Paton (1900s)
Cry the Beloved Country (black parson Stephen Kumalo searches for son Absalom in Johannesburg slums)
Nadine Gordimer (1900s)
The Soft Voice of the Serpent, The Conservationist, Burger's
Daughter, None to Accompany Me
Middle Ages Anonymous Spanish
Poem of the Cid (1140)
Juan Ruiz
Book of Good Love (1330)
Fernando de Rojas
La Celestina (1499)
Middle Ages Anonymous Spanish
Roderick (slain by Moors under Tarik 711; hermit makes him do penance in tomb of snakes)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-errant Don
Quixote of the Mancha (Alonso Quijano reads chivalry romances and changes name to Don
Quixote de la Mancha; loves Aldonza Lorenzo, renamed Dulcinea del Toboso; acquires squire
Sancho Panza and horse Rocinante; thinks windmills are giants and sheep armies), Exemplarie
Novels, The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda
Lope de Vega
Fuenteovejuna (townspeople put Com. Fernan Gomez lord of Fuenteovejuna to death for
violating peasant Laurencia; king pardons village),
Peribanez y el comendador de Ocana (governor of Ocana sends Casilda's husband
Peribanez away in army and tries to take her but he returns and kills him),
El mejor alcalde el rey (king orders Don Tello to release Elvira to Sancho, but he refuses
so is forced to marry her and then be executed so she inherits property), La Dorotea
(prose romance; Dorotea based on actress Elena Osorio)
Pedro Calderon de la Barca
El Alcalde de Zalamea (Pedro Crespo jails army captain Don Alvaro
for violating Pedro's daughter; commander Don Lope demands his freedom but he is
strangled in prison and King Philip II makes Pedro mayor of Zalamea),
El medico de su honra (Dona Mencia loves Prince Enrique but marries Don Gutierre,
who has surgeon bleed her to death; king consents),
La vida es sueno (Polish prince Segismundo is kept in tower under Clotaldo's care
because astrologers said he would hurt King Basilio; drugged and allowed to dinner
once, thinking it a dream; people revolt and liberate prince) ,
El magico prodigioso (Cipriano makes pact with devil to get Justina to love him; she
doesn't but he converts to Christianity and both are martyred by governor of Antioch),
El gran teatro del mundo (God presents performance but only he is eternal)
Jose Ruiz de Alarcon (born in Mexico; hunchback)
The Truth Suspected (liar Don Garcia loses the woman he loves), Proof of the Promises, The Walls Have Ears
Esteban Echeverria
Elvira, El Matadero (denounces Juan Manuel de Rosas dictatorship)
Jacinto Benavente
Bonds of Interest, The Passion Flower, Senora ama
Juan Ramon Jimenez
Platero and I, Diary of a Recently Married Poet
Vicente Aleixandre
Revista de Occidente, Ambito, Twenty Poems, A Longing for the Light
Miguel de Unamuno
El Cristo de Velazquez, Cancionero
Camillo Jose Cela
The Hive, Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son
Epic of Gilgamesh
(Goddess Aruru made hairy wild man Enkidu out of clay to oppose oppressive
King Gilgamesh of Erech; Enkidu protected the beasts; Gilgamesh sent a woman to seduce him;
Enkidu defeated Gilgamesh in wrestling, and they became friends; Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut
down a cedar in the sacred woods and beheaded the one-eyed monster Humbaba with the help
of Gigamesh's mom Ninsun; Ishtar tried to seduce Gilgamesh but he knew how she had treated
others such as Tammuz and refused; Enkidu died because he killed the storm bull of heaven;
Gilgamesh consulted Utnapishtim, who had been warned of a flood by wisdom god Ea and
survived by building an arc; got herb of youth from bottom of sea but stolen by a snake),
War of the Gods
("Enuma elish"; fresh water Apsu and salt water wife Tiamat had kids gods of
the deep Lahmu and Lahamu who had Anshar and Kishar, parents of sky Anu, father of wisdom
god Ea; Ea drugged and killed Apsu and dwarf counselor Mummu; Tiamat took Kingu as consort;
Ea and Damkina had storm god Marduk; Tiamat warred with principals gods who supported Marduk;
Marduk destroyed Tiamat and formed firmament and earth foundations from her body; Anu rules
area above firmament, Enlil between firmament and earth, and Ea waters below earth; Kingu killed to
make man puppet; gods built Babylon as shrine for Marduk)
Selma Lagerlof (1800s-1900s)
Gosta Berlings Saga (impulsive young man marries divorced Countess Elizabeth), Jerusalem (stories about Ingmar family and their farm at Ingmarson)
Verner von Heidenstram (1800s-1900s)
Dikter, Nya Dikter
Carl Spitteler (1800s-1900s)
Olympian Spring
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1900s Swedish
Par Lagerkvist (1900s)
Barabbas, Pilgrim at Sea, The Sibyl, The Dwarf, The Hangman, Guest of Reality
Eyvind Johnson (1900s)
Novels of Olof, Krilon (trilogy), Return to Ithaca
Harry Martinson (1900s)
Cape Farewell, The Road, Aniara
J.D. Wyss (1800s)
The Swiss Family Robinson (Swiss clergyman, wife, and 4 sons wrecked on a South Sea island)
Hermann Hesse (1900s)
Demian (Max Demian tells young Emil Sinclair about devil-god Abraxas),
Siddhartha (Siddhartha, a Brahmin, searches for ultimate reality in India),
Steppenwolf (Harry Haller is torn between artistic idealism and inhuman reality; ends in
magical theatre),
Magister Ludi The Glass Bead Game (Josef Knecht becomes master of 23rd Century glass
bead game in utopian society)
Ivo Andric (1900s)
The Bridge on the Drina (350 year history of bridge near Visegrad, Bosnia)
Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault's nursery tales (1697)
Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Tom Kitten, The Roly-Poly Pudding, Jemima Puddleduck
AA Milne
Winne-the-Pooh (Christopher Robin, Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet, Kanga, Roo)
Theodore Seuss Geisel
Horton Hatches the Egg, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole
Christmas, and Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little House on the Prairie books (move from Big Woods WI to Great Plains)
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Little Lord Fauntleray (good Cedric Errol, raised in NYC and heir to earl of Dorincourt in England, has conflict with mean grandfather), The Secret Garden (Mary Lennox lives with cold uncle Lord Craven after her parents die in India; she, servant's son Colin Craven, and supposed invalid Dickon discover a secret garden)
T(erence) H(anbury) White
The Once and Future King
Edward L. Stratemeyer
The Hardy Boys, The Rover Boys, Tom Sift, Nancy Drew (continued by daughter Harriet Adams)
Hugh Lofting
The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle (learns animal languages; Dab-Dab duck, Jip dog, Gub-Gub pig)
Eric P. Kelly
The Trumpeter of Krakow
Madeleine L'Engle
A Wrinkle in Time
William H. Armstrong
Sounder
Robert C. O'Brien
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Mildred D. Taylor
Roll of Thunder Here My Cry
Beverly Cleary
Dear Mr. Henshaw
Patricia MacLachlan
Sarah Plain and Tall
Sid Fleischman
The Whipping Boy
Jerry Spinelli
Maniac Magee
Homer
Odyssey (Ithaca King Odysseus kept 7 years on Ogygia by Calypso;
son Telemachus consults Nestor in Pylos and Menelaus in Sparta; wife
Penelope makes shroud for father-in-law Laius; released by Zeus's orders,
Odysseus tells Nausicaa, King Alcinous, and Queen Arete of Phaeacia
Schereie about wanderings: raided Ciconians, visited Lotus-Eaters, blinded
Polyphemus Cyclops, helped by King Aeolus of winds, destroyed by
Laestrygonian cannibals, turned to swine on Circe's Aeaea, saved by Hermes's
moly herb, visited Tiresias in Hades, tried to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, passed
Sirens, stole Helios's cattle on Thrinacia; Athene disguises Odysseus as beggar
but recognized by swineherd Eumaeus, dog Argus, and nurse Eurycleia; kills wife
Penelope's suitors including Irus), Iliad (Troy: Agamemnon returns Chryseis and
takes Achilles' Briseis; Paris fights Menelaus but rescued by Aphrodite;
Diomedes kills Pandarus; Hector bids farewell to Andromache; Ajax fights
Hector; Agamemnon returns Briseus; Patroclus killed by Hector; Achilles avenges
friend despite warnin g of mom Thetis; river Xanthus fights Achilles; kills Hector;
Priam gets Hector's body; Ionic dialect, dactylic hexameter, c. 9th century BC)
Cyclic poets
(poems about Trojan War and the Seven Against Thebes)
Peisander of Rhodes
Heracleia (about Hercules)
Panyasis of Halicarnassus
another Heracleia
Antimachus of Colophonor Claros
Thebais (founder of learned school of epic
poetry)
Unknown Ancient Greek Literature
Homeric Hymns, Battle of the Frogs and Mice
Hesiod
Works and Days (about everyday life), Theogony
Callinus of Ephesus
(first to use elegaic couplet)
Solon
(first Athens poet)
Archilochus of Paros
(first to use iambic verse)
Terpander of Lesvos
(first to use lyric poetry)
Sappho of Lesvos
(woman, invented Sapphic strophe)
Thaletas
(first choral lyric poet)
The Attic Period
(6th - 4th Cent. BC, drama invented by Thespis 6th Cent. BC, honor Dionysus)
Aesop (6th century BC Greek folk hero)
animal fables (popular English translation by
Samuel Croxall 1722)
Pindar ("Dircaean Swan")
Epinicia (celebrating victories or games) Tragedy
Aeschylus (of Athens)
(added 2nd actor),
Prometheus Bound (Prometheus is chained to Scythian mountain by
Hephaestus under Zeus's orders for giving man fire; Oceanus tells
Prometheus to stop defying Zeus; Iheifer Io tells of her sorrow;
Hermes tries to learn from Prometheus who will be mom of son that will
kill Zeus; Zeus sends him to Tartarus),
Oresteia (Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Iphigenia [sacrificed
daughter], Aegisthus [lover], Orestes [son, kills mom and her lover],
Electra [sister]),
Seven Against Thebes (Oedipus's son Polynices with help of Eriphyle
and King Adrastus and Amphiaraus, who foresaw only Adrastus
would survive, attack brother Eteocles for Theban throne; infant
Opheltes died; Argives almost destroyed; horse Arion saved Adrastus;
brothers killed each other),
The Suppliant Women (King Pelasgus of Argos protects Danaus and
his 50 daughters from brother Aegyptus, usurper of Egyptian throne,
from herald of Aegyptus who wants them to marry his 50 sons),
Agamemnon,
The Persians (Xerxes returns to mom Atossa in Susa after defeat)
Sophocles
Oedipus Rex (Thebes King Oedipus raised by King Polybus of Corith;
warned by Delphi he would kill dad and marry mom; killed real dad
Laius on road; saved Thebes by answering Sphinx's riddle; given
Laius's widow Jocasta and throne by Creon; Delphi told Creon to cast
Laius's murderer out, whom Tiresias says is Oedipus; Jocasta commits
suicide; Oedipus blinds self)
Antigone (Antigone buries brother Polyneices aginst order of Creon
who executes her; sister Ismene spared; Antigone, Haemon, and
Creon's wife Eurydice commit suicide),
Electra (Electra recognizes brother Orestes, who murders mom
Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus)
Euripides
The Cyclops,
Electra (Aegisthus makes Electra marry an old farmer; Orestes and
Pylades murder Aegisthus and then Clytemnestra, who is portrayed as a
victim unlike in Sophocles' Electra),
Hippolytus,
Orestes (Tyndareus, dad of Clytemnestra and Helen, convinces
Menelaus to execute Electra and Orestes; Electra, Orestes, and friend
Pylades go to Argive Assembly and plan to kill Helen and take her
daughter Hermione; Apollo [deus ex machina] dictates that Orestes
marry Hermione, Electra marry Pylades, and takes Helen to sky as
beacon for sailors),
The Bacchants (King Pentheus of Thebes torn to pieces by mom
Agave),
Medea (Jason, Medea),
The Phoenician Women (story of Seven Against Thebes; Creon's son
Menoceus kills self to save city; Jocasta kills self; Antigone exiles self
with dad Oedipus rather than marry Creon's son Haemon),
Iphigenia in Aulis (Agamemnon sacrifices daughter Iphigenia to get
good winds in Aulis harbor),
Iphigenia in Tauris (Orestes and Pylades go to Tauris to rescue statue
of Artemis, which Apollo said would cure Orestes' madness; high
priestess Iphigenia recognizes brother and they escape with Athena's
help),
Hecuba (Polyxena and Polydorus, the last 2 of Hecuba's 50 kids, are
killed, and she takes revenge on Polymestor; Agamemnon decides
against Polymestor),
The Suppliant Women (mothers of Seven Against Thebes ask Theseus
to bury their sons),
Helen (Helen brought to Egypt and Paris abducts phantom like Helen;
Menelaus realizes Trojan War was pointless),
The Children of Heracles (Eurystheus makes Heracles do 12 labors;
Iolaus kills Eurystheus to free Heracles's children)
The Trojan Women (Priam's widow Hecuba and their son Hector's
widow Andromache and mad Cassandra made slaves; Greeks sacrifice
Hector's sister Polyxena to Achilles' ghost and throw his son Astyanax
from walls; Helen persuades husband Menelaus not to kill her; play
indicts Greeks for slaughter of Melos natives),
Alcestis (Alcestis dies in place of husband Admetus but rescued by
Hercules)
Aristophanes
Daitaleis,
The Frogs (Dionysus, disguised as Heracles, goes to Hades with slave
Xanthias to retrieve Euripides for drama festival but brings back
Aeschylus instead),
The Clouds (farmer Strepsiades encourages son Pheidippides to enroll
in Socrates' school the Thinkery, where he learns to evade creditors
by shrewd arguments; mocks Sophists),
The Wasps (Bdelocleon persuades dad Philocleon, who loves to serve
on juries, to hold trials at home; dog is tried for stealing cheese),
The Peace (farmer Trygaeus flies to Zeus on dung beetle and learns that
goddess Peace has been hidden in a pit under stones by War; she is
rescued by Greeks and they feast),
Ecclesiazusae,
Plutus,
The Knights (political topics; attacks demagogue Cleon),
The Birds (Euelpides and Pithetaerus flee Athenian taxes and persuade
birds to found Cloudcuckooland, keeping sacrifice smoke from
reaching gods),
Lysistrata (Lysistrata persuades wives in Athens and Sparta to be
celibate until end of Peloponnesian War)
Menander
The Curmudgeon
Herodotus
History (of the Persian Wars)
Thucydides
History of the Peloponnesian War
Xenophon
Anabasis, Memorabilia
Timaeus
(history of Sicily, measured time by Olympiads)
Antiphon
earliest oratory ancient greek
Lysias
(wrote speech for Socrates's trial)
Isocrates Demosthenes
other significant ancient greek orators
Socrates
(Socratic paradox - knowledge is virtue, refined propositions,
syllogisms, viewed soul as combination of intelligence and character,
put to death)
Plato
The Republic (defines justice; guardians, soldiers, and workers classes),
Phaedo (disciple of Socrates describes his death), Crito, Apology,
Phaedrus (Socrates and friend Phaedrus discuss conventional and true rhetoric
[based on dialectic]; simile of charioteer with black and white steeds), Theaetetus
(Athenian mathematician Theaetetus mortally wounded in Corinthian War),
Sophist
Aristotle
(tutored Alexander the Great) Poetics (says art has origins in imitation; defines literary terms like tragedy, comedy, catharsis, hamartia, deus ex machina), Corpus Aristotelicum, Ethics, Metaphysics, Rhetoric, (biological works)
Callimachus
(librarian at Alexandria and poet)
Theocritus (of Sicily)
Idylls
Bion of Smyrna
Lament for Adonis
Moschus (of Sicily)
Europa
Polybius
(wrote about history of the Roman conquest, 146 BC)
Strabo
Geographica
Plutarch
Parallel Lives (translated by Thomas North)
Galen
(wrote about medicine)
Lucian
Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogues of the Gods, True History
The Greco-Roman Period, 2nd Century BC - 4th Century AD Unknown
Ninos Romance (first known novel)
Chariton
Chaereas and Collirhoe
Heliodorus
Aethiapieca or Theagenes and Charialeia
Longus
Daphnis and Chloe (love story of children of a goatherd and a shepherd)
Xenophon of Ephesus
Ephesiaca or Anthia and Habrocaomes
Achilles Tatius
Leucippe and Clitophon
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
(Stoic writers)
Plotinus
(Neoplatonist writer)
The Greco-Roman Period, 2nd Century BC - 4th Century AD Unknown
Greek Anthology (including Palatine and Planudean Anthologies and
epigrams)
Livius Andronicus Lucius
(Greek slave, translated Odyssey and Greek plays into Latin)
Gnaeus Naevius
(first native Roman writer, wrote comedies) Bellum Poenicum (about First Punic War)
Quintus Ennius
(invented Latin satire) Annales (about Rome's conquests)
Plautus and Terence
(wrote comedies) Latin Lit. Early Period
Cato the Elder
De Agri Cul.tura, (delivered oratories denouncing Carthage)
Gaius Lucilius
(wrote satire)
Lucretius
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Catullus
(wrote lyric poetry expressing love for Lesbia and his dead brother)
Vergil
Ecologues or Bucolics (10 pastoral poems including love song of Corydon,
Messianic Eclogue possibly prophesying Christ, death of shepherd Damon,
Song of Silenius, and Pharmaceutria),
Georgies (about agriculture; bees of Aristaeus resurrected in corpse of sacrificed
bulls; tells Orpheus and Eurydice story),
Aeneid (Trojan hero Aeneas founds Rome; loved by Dido of Carthage; visits
Anchises in underworld; steersman Palinurus first Trojan killed in Italy; marries
Lavinia; Nisus and Euryalus die trying to penetrate enemy lines; Mezentius and
Turnus slain by Aeneas)
Horace
(wrote odes)
Albius Tibullus
(love elegies)
Sulpicia
(only known Roman woman poet)
Sextus Propertius
(love elegies to Cynthia)
Ovid
Ars Amatoria (ironic handbook of love), Metamorphoses (collection of myths, including Daphne, Echo, Pygmalion and Galatea, Baucis and Philemon)
Cicero
(wrote political oratories including several denouncing Catiline and others about friendship and old age)
Gaius Julius Caesar
De Bello Gallica, De Bello Civili (about the Gallic and Civil Wars)
Livy
Ab Urbe Condita Libri (From the Founding of the City)
Lucan
Pharsalia (about Roman Civil War)
Publius Papinius Statius
The Thebais
Seneca
(wrote tragedies, promoted Stoic philosophy, tutored Nero)
Phaedrus
(slave, translated Aesop)
Petronius Arbiter
Satyricon (about human excesses)
Juvenal
(great satirist)
Martial
(epigrams, some for Juvenal)
Petronius Arbiter
Satyricon (rogue Encolpius, friend Giton, and jealous Ascyltus
wander in Rome; "Trimalchio's Feast" satirizes Nero)
Lucius Apuleius
The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses (narrated by Lucius; accidentally takes potion to make into an ass rather than an owl; wanders through Greece; restored as human by Isis)
Porphyry
Enneads (treatises about neo-Platonist Plotinus, friend of Emperor Gallienus)
allegory
device of using character and/or story elements symbolically to represent an abstraction in
addition to the literal meaning
alliteration
the repetition of sounds, especially initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words
(eg "she sells sea shells")
allusion
a direct or indirect reference to something which is presumably commonly known, such as an
event, book, myth, place, or work of art
ambiguity
the multiple meanings, either intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence, or
passage
analogy
a similarity or comparison between two different things or the relationship between them
antecedent
the word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun
aphorism
a terse statement of known authorship which expresses a general turht or moral principle
apostrophe
a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified
abstraction, such as liberty or love
atmosphere
the emotional mood created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting
and partly by the author's choice of objects that are described
clause
a grammatical unit that contains both a subject and a verb
colloquial
the use of slang or informalities in speech or writing
conceit
a fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between
seemingly dissimilar objects
connotation
the nonliteral, associative meaning of a word; the implied, suggested meaning
denotation
the strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude, or color
diction
refereing to style, diction refers to the writer's word choices, especially with regard to their
correctness, clearness, or effectiveness
didactic
from the Greek, literally means "teaching"
euphemism
from the Greek for "good speech," a more agreeable or less offensive substitute for a
generally unpleasant word or concept
extended metaphor
a metaphor developed at great length, ocurring frequently in or throughout a work
figurative language
writing or speech that is not intended to carry litera meaning and is usually meant to
be imaginative and vivid
figure of speech
a device used to produce figurative language
generic conventions
refers to traditions for each genre
genre
the major category into which a literary work fits (eg prose, poetry, and drama)
homily
literally "sermon", or any serious talk, speech, or lecture providing moral or spiritual advice
hyperbole
a figure of speech using deliberate exaggeration or overstatement
imagery
the sensory details or figurative language used to describe, arouse emotion, or represent
abstractions
Sets with similar terms