Ninth Snippet from >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education< >>>>> Literature >>>>> List of Literary Gems

This is the ninth snippet that I have posted on this blog from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.


This ninth snippet is taken from Chapter Eight:  Literature, in which I discuss forms of literature, including the novel, poetry (including the epic and the sonnet), drama, and essay.  I cover literary conventions, poetic devices, constituent elements, and various genres. 


Very importantly, in Chapter Eight:  Literature, I establish a reading list of classics and literary gems that will serve to guide readers toward the very best literature written across the world and among people of many ethnicities.


This list of classic works of literature and literary gems from many places and peoples is given below as the snippet from my chapter on literature in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education:


I. Classical Greek and Roman Literature; Classics of World Literature; Premodern and Renaissance Classics of Europe; Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature


An excellent education in literature includes classics, works that have been read by literate and intellectually engaged people for many centuries. The student acquiring an excellent education in literature should read as many classic works from each of these categories as possible. In time, the dedicated reader will have read works from each of the major categories: classical Greek literature, classical Roman literature, classics of world literature, premodern and Renaissance classics of Europe, and Shakespearean and Elizabethan literature.


Classical Greek Literature


Aeschylus,
Oresteia
Prometheus Bound

Aristophanes,
The Birds
Lysistratra


Aristotle,
Poetics


Euripides,
The Bacchae
Electra
Medea


Herodotus,
The History


Hesiod,
Works and Days


Homer,
Illiad
Odyssey


Longus,
Daphnis and Chloe


Plato,
Dialogues of Plato
The Republic




Sappho,
Ode to Aphrodite


Seneca,
Thyestes


Sophocles,
Antigone
Oedipus at Colonnus
Oedipus Tyrannus






Unknown Authorship (Greek Literature)


Hercules and His Twelve Labors
Jason and the Golden Fleece
Orpheus and Euridice





Classical Roman Literature


Cicero,
Orations




Horace,
Ars Poetica




Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things




Marcus Aurelius Antoninius,
Meditations




Ovid,
Metamorphses




Vergil,
Aeneid








Classics of World Literature




Lady Shikoku Murasaki,
The Tale of Genji




Matsuo Basho,
The Poetry of Basho




Cao Xueqin,
Dream of the Red Chamber


Valmiki,
Ramayana






Unknown Authorship (Classical World Literature)




Arabian Nights


Beowulf


Epic of Gilgamesh


Everyman


Hercules and the Twelve Labors


Mahabharata/ Bhagavad Gita






Premodern and Renaissance Classics of Europe




Giovanni Boccaceio,
The Decameron




Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales




Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy




Gottfried von Strasburg,
Tristan and Iselda




Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince
The Discourses


Sir Thomas Malory,
Le Morte d’Arthur




John Milton,
Aerogitica
Lyric Poetry of John Milton




Moliere,
The Misanthrope




Pascal,
Pensees




Francois Rabelais,
Gargantua and Pantagruel




Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queen




Wolfram von Eschenbach,
Parcival






Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature




Ben Jonson,
The Alchemist
Volpone




Christopher Marlowe,
Doctor Faustus




William Shakespeare,


Tragedies


Antony and Cleopatra


Coriolanus


Hamlet, Prince of Denmark


Julius Caesar


King Lear


Macbeth


Merchant of Venice


Richard III


Romeo and Juliet










Comedies


Comedy of Errors


Measure for Measure


Merry Wives of Windsor


A Midsummer Night’s Dream 


Much Ado About Nothing


Taming of the Shrew


The Tempest


Twelfth Night


Two Gentlemen of Verona


The Winter’s Tale










Histories


Henry IV, Part I


Henry IV, Part II


Henry V


Richard II








II. Modern and Contemporary British and American Literature


Note: African American literature and other literature from key ethnic groups in the United States are given special emphasis in the next section.


An excellent education in literature includes reading works such as those in this section emphasizing the highest quality works to emanate from the British Isles and North America during post-Renaissance modernity, with an emphasis on classics produced from the late 17th century through our own period (the post-World War II era properly classified as “contemporary history”).


High-quality literature from prominent ethnic groups in the United States would be included in this section but are instead given special attention in the next section, appearing therefore in the list subsequent to the one given here.




Fictional Prose


Hans Christian Anderson,
Fairy Tales


Ludovico Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso


Jane Austen,
Emma Pride and Prejudice


Balzac, Honore de,
Eugene Grandet
Perre Goriot


Arnold Bennett,
The Old Wives’ Tale


Charlotte Bronte,
Jane Eyre


Emily Bronte,
Wuthering Heights


Pearl Buck,
The Good Earth


Albert Camus,
The Plague

Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
Alice Through the Looking Glass


Willa Cather,
Death Comes to the Archbishop
My Antonia


James Fenimore Cooper,
The Last of the Mohicans
The Pioneers


Stephen Crane,
Red Badge of Courage


Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe


Charles Dickens,
David Copperfield   
Great Expectations
Nicholas Nickelsby  
Pickwick Papers   
Tale of Two Cities
 Oliver Twist


Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky,
Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
The Possessed


Alexander Dumas,
Count of Montecristo


George Elliot,
Middlemarch
Silas Marner


William Faulkner,
Absalom, Absalom!
As I Lay Dying
A Fable
The Sound and the Fury


Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones


F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby


Gustave Flaubert,
Madame Bovary


E. M. Forster,
A Passage to India


Anatole France,
Penguin Island


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Faust


Nikolai Gogol,
Dead Souls
“The Overcoat”


Kuut Hamsun (Kuut Pedersoen),
The Hunger


Thomas Hardy,
Jude the Obscure
Return of the Native
Tess of d’Ubervilles


Nathaniel Hawthorne,
House of the Seven Gables
The Scarlet Letter


Ernest Hemingway,
Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Old Man and the Sea


Victor Hugo,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Les Miserables


Washington Irving,
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
 “Rip Van Winkle”


Henry James,
Ambassadors Golden Bowl
Portrait of a Lady
Turn of the Screw


James Joyce,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses


Franz Kafka,
The Trial
The Castle


Rudyard Kipling,
Kim


D. H. Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers


Sinclair Lewis,
Main Street


Thomas Mann,
Buddenbrooks
Death in Venice
Magic Mountain


Herman Melville,
Benito Cereno
Billy Budd, Foretopman
Moby Dick


George Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four


Edgar Allan Poe,
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“Ligeia”


Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past


Alexander Pushkin,
The Captain’s Daughter
Eugene Onegin


Jean Paul Sartre,
Nausea


Sir Walter Scott,
Ivanhoe


Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Frankenstein


John Steinbeck,
East of Eden
Grapes of Wrath


Lawrence Stern,
Tristam Shandy


Robert Louis Stevenson,
Kidnapped
"Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
Treasure Island


Bram Stoker,
Dracula


Jonathon Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels


William Makepeace Thackeray,
Vanity Fair


Leon Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
War and Peace


Anthony Trollope,
Barchester Towers


Ivan Turgenev,
Fathers and Sons


Mark Twain,
Adventures of Huck Finn
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Life on the Mississippi


Jules Verne,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea


Voltaire,
Candide


H. G. Wells,
The Time Machine


Edith Wharton,
Ethan Frome


Emile Zola,
Germinal
 


Drama


Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot


Pedro de la Barca,
Life is a Dream


Anton Chekhov,
Three Sisters


Oliver Goldsmith,
She Stoops to Conquer


Henrik Ibsen,
A Doll’s House


Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman
The Crucible


Eugene O’Neill,
Mourning Becomes Electra
Long Day’s Journey into Night


August Stringberg,
The Father
Miss Julie


Oscar Wilde,
The Importance of Being Earnest




Poetry (including epics)


Charles Baudelaire,
Flowers of Evil


William Blake,
The Poetry of William Blake


Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Sonnets from the Portuguese


Robert Browning,
Monologue and Lyrics of Browning


John Bunyan,
Pilgrim’s Progress


George Gordon Byron,
Don Juan Lyric
Poetry of Lord Byron


Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Rime of the Ancient Mariner


Emily Dickenson,
The Poetry of Emily Dickenson


John Donne,
The Poetry of John Donne


T. S. Elliot,
Four Quartets
Wasteland


Robert Frost,
The Poetry of Robert Frost


Edgar Lee Masters,
Spoon River Anthology

Ezra Pound,
Cantos


Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound


Dylan Thomas,
Collected Poems


Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass


William Wordsworth,
The Prelude


William Butler Yeats,
The Poetry of Yeats




Nonfiction


Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologica


Henry Adams,
Education of Henry Adams


St. Augustine (Augustinius Aurelius),
Confessions        


Sir Francis Bacon,
New Atlantis


James Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson. LL. D


Charles Darwin,
On the Origin of the Species


Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Essays of Emerson


Benjamin Franklin,
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin


Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams


Edward Gibbon,
History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire


David Hume,
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding


William James,
Pragmatism


Carl Jung,
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology


Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason


Soren Kierkegaard,
Sickness and Death


John Locke,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Two Treatises on Government


Karl Marx,
Das Kapital
Communist Manifesto


John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty


Michel Eyquem Montaigne,
Essais (Essays)


Sir Thomas More,
Utopia


Friedrich Willem Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil


Thomas Paine,
Age of Reason
Common Sense
The Rights of Man


Alexander Pope,
Essay on Man


George Santayana,
Skepticism and Animal Faith


Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations


Henry David Thoreau,
The Essays of Thoreau (especially, “Civil Disobedience”)
 Walden


Alexis de Toqueville,
Democracy in America


William Butler Yeats,
Autobiography of William Butler Yeats




Medieval and Early Modern Classics of Unknown Authorship


Lazarillo de Tormes


The Nibelungenlied


Poem of the Cid


Reynard the Fox


Robin Hood’s Adventures


Sir Gawain and the Green Knight


Song of Roland




III. African American Literature and the Literature of Other Major Ethnic Groups in the United States


An excellent education in literature includes reading works such as these African American, Native American, Hispanic American, and Asian American literary gems. Readers should read as many of the following works as possible, with high rewards coming from judicious selections in each of the major ethnic groupings of literature.


African American Literature


Maya Angelou,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Poetry of Maya Angelou


James Baldwin,
Go Tell It On the Mountain
The Fire Next Time


Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones),
Dutchman


Gwendolyn Brooks,
A Street in Bronzeville


Countee Cullen,
On These I Stand


Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
Lyrics of a Lonely Life


Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man


Nikki Giovanni,
Black Talk, Black Feeling, Black Judgment


Alex Hayley,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As Told to Alex Hayley)
Roots


Langston Hughes,
Selected Poems


Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God


James Weldon Johnson,
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (poem and anthem)


Claude McKay,
The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Prose and Poetry


Terry McMillan,
Waiting to Exhale


Toni Morrison,
Beloved


Gloria Naylor,
The Ballad of Brewster Place


Sonia Sanchez,
A Blue Book for a Black Magical Woman


Ntozake Shange,
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf


Jean Toomer,
Cane


Gustavus Vassa,
The Interesting Narrative and Life of Olouda Equiano or Gustavus Vassa (Oloudah Equiano)


Alice Walker,
The Color Purple


Phillis Wheatley,
Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral


August Wilson,
Fences
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Piano Lesson


Richard Wright,
Native Son




Native American Literature


Paula Gunn Allen,
“Powwow 79, Durango” (poem)


Louis Erdich,
Love Medicine


Barry Milliken,
“Run” (short story)


Leslie Marmon Silko,
Ceremony


Mary TallMountain,
“Grease 9” (poem)
“Indian Blood” (poem)




Hispanic American Literature


Rudolf A. Anaya,
Bless Me, Ultima


Gloria Anzaldua,
This Bridge Called My Back


Alberto Alvaro Rios,
Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses


Gary Soto
Living Up the Street (poetry collection)


Helena Maria Viramontes,
”Growing” (short story)




Asian American Literature


Bharati Mukherjee,
“Orbiting” (short story)


David Mura,
After We Lost Our Way (poetry collection)


Maxine Hong Kingston,
Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts


Amy Tan,
The Joy Luck Club


Hisaye Yamamoto,
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (short story collection)