Expanded from Kinkazzo Burning's THE WESTERN CANON
THE WESTERN CANONACCORDING TO HAROLD BLOOM & Kinkazzo
~ With links, texts, excerpts, references, reviews et al.
INTRODUCTION
The best of Western literature is considered to be the Western Canon. The list of works in the Western Canon varies according to the critic's opinions on Western culture and the relative importance of its defining characteristics.
The Western Canon is a term used to denote a canon of books, and, more widely, music and art, that has been the most influential in shaping Western culture. It asserts a compendium of the greatest works of artistic merit. Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism (i.e., of everlasting importance to all) and the development of high culture. Although previously held in high regard, it has been the subject of increasing contention through the latter half of the 20th century. In practice, debates, and attempts to actually define the Canon in lists, are essentially restricted to books of various sorts: Literature, including Poetry, Fiction and Drama, autobiographical writings and Letters, Philosophy and History. A few accessible books on the Sciences are usually included.
So here’s a LIST! Who drafted it?
-Answer: the eminent American critic Harold Bloom, literatus supremus & currently (2007) a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University. What follows below is in fact his interpretation of the Western Canon, as presented in the homonymous book THE WESTERN CANON. I regard it as an excellent approximation of a perennial canonical Canon...!
[excerpt]
AESTHETIC AUTONOMY
I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the aesthetic, but its best defense is the experience of reading King Lear and then seeing the play well performed. King Lear does not derive from a crisis in philosophy, nor can its power be explained away as a mystification somehow promoted by the bourgeois institutions. It is a mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
MORALITY
The silliest way to defend the Western Canon is to insist that it incarnates all of the seven deadly moral virtues that make up our supposed range of normative values and democratic principles. This is palpably untrue...The West's greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
POLITICS
What interests me more is the flight from the aesthetic among so many in my profession, some of whom at least began with the ability to experience aesthetic value. In Freud, flight is the metaphor for repression, for unconscious yet purposeful forgetting. The purpose is clear enough in my profession's flight: to assuage displaced guilt. Forgetting, in an aesthetic context, is ruinous, for cognition, in criticism, always relies on memory. Longinus would have said that pleasure is what the resenters have forgotten. Nietzsche would have called it pain; but they would have been thinking of the same experience upon the heights. Those who descend from there, lemminglike, chant the litany that literature is best explained as a mystification promoted by bourgeois institutions. This reduces the aesthetic to ideology, or at best to metaphysics. A poem cannot be read as a poem, because it is primarily a social document or, rarely yet possibly, an attempt to overcome philosophy. Against this approach I urge a stubborn resistance whose single aim is to preserve poetry as fully and purely as possible. Our legions who have deserted represent a strand in our traditions that has always been in flight from the aesthetic: Platonic moralism and Aristotelian social science. The attack on poetry either exiles it for being destructive of social well-being or allows it sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism. Beneath the surfaces of academic Marxism, Feminism, and New Historicism, the ancient polemic of Platonism and the equally archaic Aristotelian social medicine continue to course on.
ORIGINALITY
One mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies. Dante is the largest instance of the first possibility, and Shakespeare, the overwhelming example of the second.
...and finally:
CANON OF WESTERN LITERATURE
The Western Canon, despite the limitless idealism of those who would open it up, exists precisely in order to impose limits, to set a standard of measurement that is anything but political or moral. I am aware that there is now a kind of covert alliance between popular culture and what calls itself "cultural criticism," and in the name of that alliance cognition itself may doubtless yet acquire the stigma of the incorrect. Cognition cannot be placed without memory, and the Canon is the true art of memory, the authentic foundation for cultural thinking. Most simply, the Canon is Plato and Shakespeare; it is the image of the individual thinking, whether it be Socrates thinking through his own dying, or Hamlet contemplating that undiscovered company. Mortality joins memory in the consciousness of reality-testing that the Canon induces. By its very nature, the Western Canon will never close, but it cannot be forced open by our current cheerleaders. Strength alone can open it up, the strength of a Freud or a Kafka, persistent in their cognitive negations.
Here we go then...
CONTENTS:
~The Theocratic Age: 2000 BCE-1321 CE
~The Aristocratic Age: 1321-1832
~The Democratic Age: 1832-1900
~The Chaotic Age: 20th Century
[where possible, authors & titles have been linked
to bios and downloadable eBooks --
To quickly find a specific author/title,
use top bar's Edit/Find button]
to bios and downloadable eBooks --
To quickly find a specific author/title,
use top bar's Edit/Find button]
THE THEOCRATIC AGE
"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran....
"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
(Bloom, p. 531)
The Ancient Near East
Gilgamesh
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Holy Bible (King James Version)
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)
Ancient India (Sanskrit)
Mahabharata
Bhagavad-Gita
Ramayana
The Ancient Greeks
---Iliad
---Odyssey
---Works and Days
---Theogony
---Odes
---Oresteia
---Seven Against Thebes
---Prometheus Bound
---Persians
---Suppliant Women
---Oedipus the King
---Oedipus at Colonus
---Antigone
---Electra
---Ajax
---Women of Trachis
---Philoctetes
---Cyclops
---Heracles
---Alcestis
---Hecuba
---Bacchae
---Orestes
---Andromache
---Medea
---Ion
---Hippolytus
---Helen
---Iphigenia at Aulis
---The Birds
---The Clouds
---The Frogs
---Lysistrata
---The Knights
---The Wasps
---The Assemblywomen
---The Histories
---The Peloponnesian Wars
---Dialogues
---Poetics
---Ethics
Hellenistic Greeks
---The Girl from Samos
---On the Sublime
---Hymns and Epigrams
---Idylls
---Lives
---Moralia
---Fables
---Satires
The Romans
---Pseudolus
---The Braggart Soldier
---The Rope
---Amphitryon
---The Girl from Andros
---The Eunuch
---The Mother-in-Law
---The Way Things Are
---On the Gods
---Odes
---Epistles
---Satires
---Satires
---Attis and Other Poems
---Aeneid
---Eclogues
---Georgics
---Pharsalia
---Metamorphoses
---The Art of Love
---Heroides
---Satires
---Epigrams
---Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
---Satyricon
---The Golden Ass
The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
---City of God
---Confessions
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
The Poetic Edda
---The Prose Edda
---The Nibelungen Lied
---Parzival
---Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
Beowulf F ...... KK
The Poem of the Cid
---The Book of the City of Ladies
---Prison of Love (Cárcel de amor)
THE ARISTOCRATIC AGE
"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...."
(Bloom, p. 534)
Italy
---The Divine Comedy
---The New Life
---Lyric Poems
---Selections
---The Decameron
---Orlando Innamorato
---Orlando Furioso
---Sonnets and Madrigals
---The Prince
---The Mandrake, a Comedy (Mandragola)
---Notebooks
---The Book of the Courtier
---Sonnets and Madrigals
---Lives of the Painters
---Autobiography
---Jerusalem Delivered
---The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Spaccio de la bestia trionfante)
---Poems
---The City of the Sun
---Principles of a New Science
---The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni)
---Saul
Portugal--- The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas)
---Poetry
Spain
---Coplas
---La Celestina
Lazarillo de Tormes F ...... KK
---Visions
---Satirical Letter of Censure
---Poems
---Poems
---Sonnets
---Soledades
---Don Quixote
---Exemplary Stories
---La Dorotea
---Fuente Ovejuna
---Lost in a Mirror (El Castigo sin venganza)
---The Knight of Olmedo
---The Trickster of Seville
---Life is a Dream
---The Mayor of Zalamea
---The Mighty Magician
---The Doctor of His Own Honor
---Poems
England and Scotland
---The Canterbury Tales
---Troilus and Criseyde
---Le Morte D'Arthur
---Poems
---Poems
---Utopia
---Poems
---Poems
---The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
---Astrophel and Stella
---An Apology for Poetry
---Poems
---The Faerie Queene
---The Minor Poems
---Poems
---Poems and Plays
---Poems
---Poems
---A Defence of Ryme
---The Unfortunate Traveller
---The Spanish Tragedy
---Plays and Poems (the whole opus) --- [main link here]
---Songs
---Poems
---Sermons
---Poems, Plays, and Masques
---Essays
---The Anatomy of Melancholy
---Religio Medici
---Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
---The Garden of Cyrus
---Leviathan
---Poems
---Poems
---Poems
---Poems
---The Temple
---Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
---Poetry
---Poems
---Poems
---Plays
---Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
---'Tis Pity She's a Whore
---The Malcontent
---The White Devil
---The Duchess of Malfi
---The Changeling
---The Revenger's Tragedy
---A New Way to Pay Old Debts
---The Pilgrim's Progress
---The Compleat Angler
---Paradise Lost
---Paradise Regained
---Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems
---Samson Agonistes
---Areopagitica
---Brief Lives
---Holy Dying
---Hudibras
---Poetry and Plays
---Critical Essays
---Venice Preserv'd
---The Way of the World
---Love for Love
---A Tale of a Tub
---Gulliver's Travels
---Shorter Prose Works
---Poems
---The Man of Mode
---Poems
---The Beggar's Opera
---Life of Johnson
---Journals
---Works
---The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
---A Philosophical Enquiry into...the Sublime and Beautiful
---Reflections on the Revolution in France
---An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
---Poems
---The Beaux' Strategem
---The Recruiting Officer
---The Country Wife
---The Plain Dealer
---Jubilate Agno
---A Song to David
---The Vicar of Wakefield
---She Stoops to Conquer
---The Traveller
---The Deserted Village
---The School of Scandal
---The Rivals
---Poetical Works
---Poetical Works
---Moll Flanders
---Robinson Crusoe
---A Journal of the Plague Year
---Clarissa
---Pamela
---Sir Charles Grandison
---Joseph Andrews
---The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
---The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
---The Adventures of Roderick Random
---The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
---A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
---Evelina
---The Spectator
France
---Chronicles
The Song of Roland
---Poems
---Essays
---Gargantua and Pantagruel
---The Heptameron
---The Regrets
---Délie
---Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
---Memoirs
---Les Tragiques
---Mark Antony (Marc Antoine)
---The Jewesses
---The Cid
---Polyeucte
---Nicomède
---Horace
---Cinna
---Rodogune
---Maxims
---Fables
---The Misanthrope
---Tartuffe
---The School for Wives
---The Learned Ladies
---Don Juan
---School for Husbands
---Ridiculous Precieuses
---The Would-Be Gentleman
---The Miser
---The Imaginary Invalid
---Pensées
---Funerary Orations
---The Art of Poetry
---Lutrin
---Phaedra
---Andromache
---Britannicus
---Athaliah
---Seven Comedies
---The Confessions
---Émile
---La Nouvelle Héloïse
---Zadig
---Candide
---Letters on England
---The Lisbon Earthquake
---Manon Lescaut
---The Princess of Cleves
---Products of the Perfected Civilization
---Rameau's Nephew
---Dangerous Liaisons
Germany
---In Praise of Folly
---Faust, Parts One and Two
---Dichtung und Wahrheit
---Egmont
---Elective Affinities
---The Sorrows of Young Werther
---Poems
---Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
---Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering
---Italian Journey
---Verse Plays
---Hermann and Dorothea
---Roman Elegies
---Venetian Epigrams
---West-Eastern Divan
---The Robbers
---Mary Stuart
---Wallenstein
---Don Carlos
---On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature
---Laocoön
---Nathan the Wise
---Hymns and Fragments
---Selected Poems
---Five Plays
---Stories
THE DEMOCRATIC AGE
"I have located Vico's Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength of both Russian and American literature begins."
(Bloom, p. 540)
Italy
---On Sepulchres
---Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
---Odes and The Graces
---The Betrothed
---On the Historical Novel
---Essays and Dialogues
---Poems
---The Moral Essays
---Roman Sonnets
---Hymn to Satan
---Barbarian Odes
---Rhymes and Rhythms
---Little Novels of Sicily
---Mastro Don Gesualdo
---The House by the Medlar Tree
---The She-Wolf and Other Stories
---While the East Wind Blows (see also all her works in Italian downloadable at Liber Liber)
Spain and Portugal
---Poems
---Fortunata and Jacinta
---La Regenta
---The Maias
France
---Adolphe
---The Red Notebook
---Attala
---René
---The Genius of Christianity
---Meditations
---Chatterton
---Poems
---The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems
---Les Misérables
---Notre-Dame of Paris
---William Shakespeare
---The Toilers of the Sea
---The End of Satan
---God
---Poems
---Lorenzaccio
---The Chimeras
---Sylvie
---Aurelia
---Mademoiselle de Maupin
---Enamels and Cameos
---The Girl with the Golden Eyes
---Louis Lambert
---The Wild Ass's Skin
---Old Goriot
---Cousin Bette
---A Harlot High and Low
---Eugénie Grandet
---Ursule Mirouet
---On Love
---The Red and the Black
---The Charterhouse of Parma
---Madame Bovary
---Sentimental Education
---Salammbô
---A Simple Soul
---The Haunted Pool
---Flowers of Evil
---Paris Spleen
---Selected Poetry and Prose
---Selected Poems
---Complete Works---
[Kinkazzo's PORTAL RIMBAUD - whole opus in 3 languages!]
---Les Armours Jaunes
---Selected Writings
---Selected Short Stories
---Germinal
---L'Assommoir
---Nana
Scandinavia
---Brand
---Peer Gynt
---Emperor and Galilean
---Hedda Gabler
---The Master Builder
---The Lady from the Sea
---When We Dead Awaken
---To Damascus
---Miss Julie
---The Father
---The Dance of Death
---The Ghost Sonata
---A Dream Play
Great Britain
---Poems
---Complete Poetry and Prose
---Poems
---The Prelude
---Waverley
---The Heart of Midlothian
---Redgauntlet
---Old Mortality
---Pride and Prejudice
---Emma
---Mansfield Park
---Persuasion
---Poems and Prose
---The Grasmere Journal
---Essays and Criticism
---Don Juan
---Poems
---Poems
---Imaginary Conversations
---Confessions of an English Opium Eater
---Selected Prose
---Essays
---Castle Rackrent
---The Entail
---Cranford
---Mary Barton
---North and South
---The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
---Melmoth the Wanderer
---Poems
---A Defence of Poetry
---Frankenstein
---Poems
---Poems and Letters
---Death's Jest-Book
---Poems
---Nepenthe
---Poems
---Poems
---Poems
---Poems
---The Ring and the Book
---The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
---David Copperfield
---The Adventures of Oliver Twist
---A Tale of Two Cities
---Bleak House
---Hard Times
---Nicholas Nickleby
---Dombey and Son
---Great Expectations
---Martin Chuzzlewit
---Christmas Stories
---Little Dorrit
---Our Mutual Friend
---The Mystery of Edwin Drood
---Poems
---Poems and Translations
---Poems
---Essays
---Poems
---Poems
---Nightmare Abbey
---Gryll Grange
---Poems and Prose
---Selected Prose
---Sartor Resartus
---Modern Painters
---The Stones of Venice
---Unto This Last
---The Queen of the Air
---Studies in the History of the Renaissance
---Appreciations
---Imaginary Portraits
---Marius the Epicurean
---The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
---On Liberty
---Autobiography
---Apologia pro Vita Sua
---A Grammar of Assent
---The Idea of a University
---The Barsetshire Novels
---The Palliser Novels
---Orley Farm
---The Way We Live Now
---Complete Works
---Complete Nonsense
---New Grub Street
---Poems and Letters
---Jane Eyre
---Villette
---Poems
---Wuthering Heights
---Vanity Fair
---The History of Henry Esmond
---Poems
---The Egoist
---Poems
---Poems
---Poems
---Collected Poems
---The Man Who Was Thursday
---Erewhon
---The Way of All Flesh
---Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan
---Bab Ballads
---The Moonstone
---The Woman in White
---No Name
---Odes
---The City of the Dreadful Night
---Plays
---The Picture of Dorian Gray
---The Artist as Critic
---Letters
---Ballads and Songs
---Complete Poems
---Adam Bede
---Silas Marner
---The Mill on the Floss
---Middlemarch
---Daniel Deronda
---Essays
---Kidnapped
---Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
---Treasure Island
---The New Arabian Nights
---The Master of Ballantrae
---Weir of Hermiston
---Early Romances
---Poems
---The Earthly Paradise
---The Well at the World's End
---News from Nowhere
---Dracula
---Lilith
---At the Back of the North Wind
Germany
---Hymns to the Night
---Aphorisms
---Fairy Tales
---Selected Poems
---Mozart on His Way to Prague
---Immensee
---Poems
---Green Henry
---Tales
---The Devil's Elixir
---Tales
---The Black Spider
---Indian Summer
---Tales
---Criticism and Aphorisms
---Danton's Death
---Woyzeck
---Complete Poems
---The Ring of the Nibelung
---The Birth of Tragedy
---Beyond Good and Evil
---On the Genealogy of Morals
---The Will to Power
---Effi Briest
---Selected Poems
Russia
---Complete Prose Tales
---Complete Poetry
---Eugene Onegin
---Narrative Poems
---Boris Godunov
---The Complete Tales
---Dead Souls
---The Government Inspector (The Inspector-General)
---Narrative Poems
---A Hero of Our Time
---A Family Chronicle
---My Past and Thoughts
---From the Other Shore
---The Frigate Pallada
---Oblomov
---A Sportsman's Notebook
---A Month in the Country
---Fathers and Sons
---On the Eve
---First Love
---Notes from the Underground
---Crime and Punishment
---The Idiot
---The Possessed (The Devils)
---The Brothers Karamazov
---Short Novels
---The Cossacks
---War and Peace
---Anna Karenina
---A Confession
---The Power of Darkness
---Short Novels
---Tales
---The Storm
---What is to Be Done?
---The Twelve and Other Poems
---The Tales
---The Major Plays
The United States
---The Sketch Book
---Collected Poems
---The Deerslayers
---Collected Poems
---Nature
---Essays, first and second series
---Representative Men
---The Conduct of Life
---Journals
---Poems
---Complete Poems
---Leaves of Grass, first edition
---Leaves of Grass, third edition
---The Complete Poems
---Specimen Days
---The Scarlet Letter
---Tales and Sketches
---The Marble Faun
---Notebooks
---Moby-Dick
---The Piazza Tales
---Billy Budd
---Collected Poems
---Clarel
---Poetry and Tales
---Essays and Reviews
---The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
---Eureka
---Essays and Poems
---The Cricket and Other Poems
---Walden
---Poems
---Essays
---Two Years Before the Mast
---Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
---Selected Poems
---Poems
---France and England in North America
---The California and Oregon Trail
---The Education of Henry Adams
---Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres
---Collected Writings
---Little Women
---The Short Fiction
---The Awakening
---The Rise of Silas Lapham
---A Modern Instance
---The Red Badge of Courage
---Stories and Poems
---The Portrait of a Lady
---The Bostonians
---The Princess Casamassima
---The Awkward Age
---Short Novels and Tales
---The Ambassadors
---The Wings of the Dove
---The Golden Bowl
---The Damnation of Theron Ware
---Complete Short Stories
---The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
---The Devil's Racetrack
---Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger
---Pudd'nhead Wilson
---A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
---The Varieties of Religious Experience
---Pragmatism
---The Octopus
---The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
---Poems
THE CHAOTIC AGE: A CANONICAL PROPHECY
"I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug's game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind."
(Bloom, p. 548)
*[authors with asterisk* are my own "addition" to the Canon - I couldn't bear not to list them...
They mean far too much to me!]
They mean far too much to me!]
Italy
---Naked Masks: Five Plays
---Maia: In Praise of Life
---Orphic Songs
---Stories and Recollections
---Poems
---The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)
---Selected Poems
---The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems
---The Storm and Other Things: Poems
---The Occasions: Poems
---Cuttlefish Bones: Poems
---Otherwise: Last and First Poems
---The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays
---Selected Writings: Poems and Discourse on Poetry
---Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
---Day of the Owl (Il Giorno della Civetta)
---Equal Danger
---The Wine-Dark Sea: Thirteen Stories
---Poems
---Hard Labor: Poems
---Dialogues with Leucò
---If Not Now, When?
---Collected Poems
---The Periodic Table
---The Confession of Zeno
---As a Man Grows Older
---The Heron
---Family
---Women of Messina
---1934
---Selected Poetry
---Invisible Cities
---The Baron in the Trees
---If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
---t zero
---Kisses from Another Dream: Poems
Spain
---Three Exemplary Novels
---Our Lord Don Quixote
---Selected Poems
---Invisible Reality: Poems
---My Voice Because of You: Poems
---Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet
---A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernardo Alba
---The Owl's Insomnia: Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---The Hive
---Space in Motion
Catalonia
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Natural History
---The Time of the Doves
---Selected Poems
---La Pell de Brau: Poems
Portugal
---The Keeper of Sheep
---Poems
---Selected Poems
---Always Astonished: Selected Poems
---The Book of Disquiet
---Selected Poems
---Baltasar and Blimunda
---Ballad of Dogs' Beach
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
France
---Penguin Island
---Thaïs
---Le Grand Meaulnes
---Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)
---The Immoralist
---Corydon
---Lafcadio's Adventure (The Caves of the Vatican)
---The Journals
---Collected Stories
---Retreat from Love
---Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel)
---Journey to the End of Night
---Mount Analogue
---Our Lady of the Flowers
---The Thief's Journal
---The Balcony
---Four Plays
---Selected Works
---The Infernal Machine and Other Works
---Selected Writings
---Poems
---Manifestoes of Surrealism
---The Art of Poetry
---Selected Writings
---Poems
---Moravagine*
---Selected poems*
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---The Horseman on the Roof (other works)
---Manhood
---Count d'Orgel's Ball
---No Exit
---Nausea
---Saint Genet
---The Words
---The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert
---The Second Sex
---The Stranger
---The Plague
---The Fall
---The Rebel
---Selected Writings
---The Book of Questions
---Selected Poems
---Anabasis
---Birds
---Exile and Other Poems
---Selected Poems
---Seven Dada Manifestoes
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Things: Selected Writings
---Paroles
---Selected Poems (translated by Paul Auster)
---The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
---Selected Poems
---The Conquerors
---The Royal Way
---Man's Fate
---Man's Hope
---The Voices of Silence
---Therese
---The Desert of Love
---The Woman of the Pharisees
---Becket
---Antigone
---Eurydice
---The Rehearsal
---The Bald Soprano
---The Chairs
---The Lesson
---Amédée
---Victims of Duty
---Rhinoceros
---Thomas the Obscure
---The Laws of Hospitality
---The Baphomet
---Locus Solus
---Selected Writings
---Tristes Tropiques
---The Voyeur
---Jealousy
---In the Labyrinth
---The Erasers
---Project for a Revolution in New York
---For a New Novel
---The Use of Speech
---The Planetarium
---The Grass
---The Wind
---The Flanders Road
---The Lover
---Four Novels
---Fable
---The Libera Me Domine
---That Voice
---The Ogre
---Friday
---Coup de Grace
---Memoirs of Hadrian
---Life: A User's Manual*
---Transparence of the World: Poems
---Words in Stone (selected poems)
Great Britain and Ireland
---The Collected Poems
---Collected Plays
---A Vision
---Mythologies
---Major Critical Essays
---Heartbreak House
---Pygmalion
---Saint Joan
---Major Barbara
---Back to Methuselah
---Collected Plays
---Juno and the Paycock
---The Plough and the Stars
---The Shadow of a Gunman
---House with the Green Shutters
---The Well-Beloved
---The Woodlanders
---The Return of the Native
---The Mayor of Casterbridge
---Far From the Madding Crowd
---Tess of the D'Urbervilles
---Jude the Obscure
---Collected Poems
---Kim
---Collected Stories
---Puck of Pook's Hill
---Complete Verse
---Collected Poems
---Zuleika Dobson
---Seven Men and Two Others
---Lord Jim
---The Secret Agent
---Nostromo
---Under Western Eyes
---Victory
---Five Novels
---Parade's End
---The Good Soldier
---Collected Short Stories
---The Moon and Sixpence
---Wolf Solent
---A Glastonbury Romance
---The Short Stories
---The Science Fiction Novels
---A Voyage to Arcturus
---The Old Wives' Tale
---Collected Poems
---Memoirs of a Midget
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---King Jesus
---Collected Poems
---In Parenthesis
---The Anathemata
---The Forsyte Saga
---Howards End
---A Passage to India
---Collected Stories
---Complete Poems
---Studies in Classic American Literature
---Complete Short Stories
---Sons and Lovers
---The Rainbow
---Women in Love
---Mrs. Dalloway
---To the Lighthouse
---Orlando: A Biography
---The Waves
---Between the Acts
---Dubliners
---Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
---Ulysses
---Finnegans Wake
---Murphy
---Watt
---Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
---Waiting for Godot
---Endgame
---Krapp's Last Game
---How It Is
---Collected Stories
---The Siege of Krishnapur
---Nothing
---Loving
---Party Going
---The Jeeves stories*
---A Handful of Dust
---Scoop
---Vile Bodies
---Put Out More Flags
---Sword of Honour (trilogy)*
---Nothing Like the Sun
---Earthly Powers*
---The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
---The Good Apprentice
---Bruno's Dream
---The Lord of the Rings*
---Brighton Rock
---The Heart of the Matter
---The Power and the Glory
---The Berlin Stories
---South Wind
---Collected Essays
---Antic Hay
---Point Counter Point
---Brave New World
---Alexandria Quartet
---Pincher Martin
---The Golden Notebook
---The Gormenghast Trilogy
---The Passion
---Collected Poems (on Vagheggiando - bilingual)
---The Dyer's Hand
---Collected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Milton's God
---Some Versions of Pastoral
---The Wheel of Fire
---The Burning Oracle
---Poems
---The Sense of an Ending
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Collected Poems
---The Death of Woman Wang
---The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
---Selected Poems
---The Complete Poems
---Complete Poems
---Collected Poems
---The Poems
---Cards of Identity
---Selected Poems: 1969-1987
---Field Work
---Station Island
---Peppercanister Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Plays
---The Complete Plays
---The Dalkey Archive
---The Third Policeman
---Travesties
---The Caretaker
---The Homecoming
---The Fool
---Saved
---Collected Essays
---1984
---A Fanatic Heart
Germany
---Poems and Verse Plays
---Selected Prose
---Selected Plays and Libretti
---Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies)
---The Sonnets to Orpheus
---The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
---New Poems: First Part and Other Part
---The Sleepwalkers
---The Death of Virgil
---Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Amerika
---The Complete Stories
---The Blue Octavo Notebook
---The Trial
---The Diaries
---The Castle
---Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms
---Poems, 1913-1956
---The Threepenny Opera
---The Good Woman of Setzuan
---Mother Courage and Her Children
---Galileo
---The Caucasian Chalk Circle
---Plays and Stories
---Lulu Plays
---Spring Awakening
---The Last Days of Mankind
---Moles
---The Magic Mountain
---Stories of Three Decades
---Joseph and His Brothers
---Doctor Faustus
---Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
---Berlin Alexanderplatz
---The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
---Narcissus and Goldmund
---Young Törless
---The Man Without Qualities
---The Radetzky March
---Poems (Italian translations on Vagheggiando)
---Woodcutters (see also Five Stories)
---Billiards at Half-Past Nine
---In the Storm of Roses
---Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems
---Illuminations
---Selected Stories
---Cassandra
---Slow Homecoming
---I'm Not Stiller
---Man in the Holocene
---The Tin Drum
---The Flounder
---The Visit
---Shadow Lands
Russia
---Poems
---Selected Tales
---Petersburg
---Selected Poems
---The King of Time
---The Bedbug and Selected Poetry
---And Quiet Flows the Don
---The Master and the Margarita
---Alexandrian Songs
---Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev
---Autobiography
---Selected Stories
---Collected Stories
---Doctor Zhivago
---Selected Poems (on Vagheggiando in Italian)
---Envy (see also short story “The Cherry Seed”)
---Selected Poems
---Nervous People and Other Satires
---The Foundation Pit
---One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
---The Cancer Ward
---The Gulag Archipelago
---August 1914
---A Part of Speech: Poems (pdf)
Scandinavia
---Winter's Tales
---Seven Gothic Tales
---Pelle the Conqueror
---Hunger
---Pan
---Kristin Lavransdatter
---Guide to the Underworld (some poems in translation)
---Selected Poems
---Barabbas
---Selected Poems
Serbo-Croat
---The Bridge on the Drina
---Selected Poems
---A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
Czech
---War with the Newts
---R.U.R.
---Largo Desolato
---The Unbearable Lightness of Being
---Selected Poetry
---Supposed to Fly
Polish
---The Street of Crocodiles
---Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
---Selected Poems
---Three Novels
---The Investigation
---Solaris
---Selected Poems
---Tremor
Hungarian
---Perched on Nothing's Branch
---Selected Poems
---Guilt
Modern Greek
---Collected Poems (on Vagheggiando in Italian)
---Collected Poems
---The Greek Passion
---The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
---Exile and Return (Moonlight Sonata)
---What I Love: Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
Yiddish
---Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
---The Nightingale
---The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third
---Selected Stories
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---The Brothers Ashkenazi
---Yoshe Kalb
---The Yeshiva
---The Dybbuk
---Selected Poems
---East River
---Collected Stories
---In My Father's Court
---The Manor, the Estate, the Family Moskat
---Satan in Goray
Hebrew
---Shirot Bialik: The Epic Poems
---In the Heart of the Seas
---Twenty-One Stories
---The Immortal Bartfuss
---Badenheim 1939
---Past Continuous
---Selected Poetry
---Travels
---A Late Divorce
---A Perfect Peace
---At the Stone of Losses
---Selected Poem
---A Dress of Fire
---Selected Poems
---The Palace of Shattered Vessels
---See Under: Love
---His Daughter
Arabic
---Midaq Alley
---Fountain and Tomb
---Miramar
---Selected Poems
---The Music of Human Flesh
---An Egyptian Childhood (Pierre Cachia's study)
Latin America
---Selected Poetry
---The Aleph and Other Stories
---Dreamtigers (The Maker)
---Ficciones
---Labyrinths
---A Personal Anthology
---Explosion in a Cathedral
---The Lost Steps
---Reasons of State
---The Kingdom of This World
---Three Trapped Tigers
---View of Dawn in the Tropics
---Maitreya
---The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando
---Canto General
---Residence on Earth
---Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
---Fully Empowered
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---The Collected Poems
---The Labyrinth of Solitude
---Selected Poems
---Spain, Take This Cup from Me
---Men of Maize
---Paradiso
---The Obscene Bird of Night
---Hopscotch
---All Fires the Fire
---Blow-up and Other Stories
---One Hundred Years of Solitude
---Love in the Time of Cholera
---The War of the End of the World
---A Change of Skin
---Terra Nostra
---Travelling in the Family
The West Indies
---The Black Jacobins
---The Future in the Present
---A Bend in the River
---A House for Mr. Biswas
---Collected Poems
---The Guyana Quartet
---The Harder They Come
---Collected Poetry
Africa
---Things Fall Apart
---Arrow of God
---No Longer at Ease
---A Dance of the Forest
---The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town
---Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder
---Casualties: Poems
---The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
---A Grain of Wheat
---The Fisherman's Invocation
---Collected Stories
---Foe
---A Lesson from Aloes
---Selected Poems
India (in English)
---The Guide
---Midnight's Children
---Heat and Dust
Canada
---Under the Volcano
---The Deptford Trilogy
---The Rebel Angels
---Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
---Fables of Identity
---Selected Poems
---Poems Twice Told
---Joshua Then and Now
---Barney's Version*
---Surfacing
---Selected Poems
Australia and New Zealand
---My Brilliant Career
---The Short Stories
---Collected Poems
---Riders in the Chariot
---A Fringe of Leaves
---Voss
---The Man Who Loved Children
---Selected Poems
---The Rabbiter's Bounty: Collected Poems
---The Playmaker
---Schindler's List
---An Imaginary Life
---Peniel and Other Poems
---Oscar and Lucinda
---Illywhacker
The United States
---Selected Poems
---The Poetry
---Collected Short Stories
---The Age of Innocence
---Ethan Frome
---The House of Mirth
---The Custom of the Country
---My Ántonia
---The Professor's House
---A Lost Lady
---Three Lives
---The Geographical History of America
---The Making of Americans
---Tender Buttons
---Collected Poems
---The Necessary Angel
---Opus Posthumous
---The Palm at the End of the Mind
---Collected Poems
---Spoon River Anthology
---Sister Carrie
---An American Tragedy
---Winesburg, Ohio
---Death in the Woods and Other Stories
---Babbitt
---It Can't Happen Here
---Last Poems
---Spring and All
---Paterson
---Collected Poems
---Personae: Collected Poems
---The Cantos
---Literary Essays
---Selected Poems (pdf)
---Complete Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---The Complete Poems and Plays
---Selected Essays
---Collected Stories
---Cane
---U.S.A. (see also his Three Soldiers)
---Collected Poems
---Lazarus Laughed
---The Iceman Cometh
---Long Day's Journey Into Night
---Complete Poems
---Collected Poems
---Spring Shade: Poems
---The Blue Estuaries: Selected Poems
---Poems: A Selection
---Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose
---Collected Poems
---Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
---The Great Gatsby
---Tender is the Night
---As I Lay Dying
---Sanctuary
---Light in August
---Absalom, Absalom!
---The Sound and the Fury
---The Wild Palms
---The Collected Stories
---The Hamlet
---Complete Short Stories
---A Farewell to Arms
---The Sun Also Rises
---The Garden of Eden
---Across the River and Into the Trees* (his low-water mark, but my madeleine)
---The Old Man and the Sea*
---The Grapes of Wrath
---Their Eyes Were Watching God
---Miss Lonelyhearts
---A Cool Million
---The Day of the Locust
---Native Son
---Black Boy
---Collected Stories
---Delta Wedding
---The Robber Bridegroom
---The Ponder Heart
---Selected Poems
---The Big Sea
---I Wonder as I Wander
---The Shores of Light
---Patriotic Gore
---Counter-statement
---A Rhetoric of Motives
---Up in the Old Hotel
---The Rise of David Levinsky
---Three Short Novels
---Barren Ground
---Vein of Iron
---H. M. Pulham, Esquire (see also his The Unspeakable Gentleman)
---Collected Stories
---Appointment in Samarra
---Call It Sleep
---Three Plays
---All the King's Men
---World Enough and Time
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (pdf)
---Collected Poems
---The Complete Poems
---Collected Poems (pdf)
---The Sheltering Sky
---Complete Poems
---Night*
---The Maximus Poems
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems (pdf)
---Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Straw for the Fire
---Permit Me Voyage
---Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
---Selected Poems
---New & Selected Things Taking Place
---In Other Words (pdf)
---Bending the Bow
---New and Collected Poems
---Collected Poems
---Harlem Gallery
---Seasons on Earth (pdf)
---Selected Poems
---Collected Poems
---The Price of the Ticket
---Seize the Day
---The Adventures of Augie March
---Herzog
---More Die of Heartbreak*
---The Stories
---Falconer*
---Bullet Park
---Invisible Man
---In Cold Blood
---The Grass Harp*
---The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
---The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
---Complete Stories
---The Violent Bear It Away
---Wise Blood
---Lolita
---Pale Fire
---Myra Breckenridge
---Lincoln
---The Long March
---The Catcher in the Rye
---Nine Stories
---Ceremony in Lone Tree
---The Stories
---The Fixer
---Pictures of Fidelman*
---Advertisements for Myself
---The Executioner's Song
---Ancient Evenings
---The Cannibal
---Second Skin
---The Recognitions
---The Glass Menagerie
---A Streetcar Named Desire
---Summer and Smoke
---Death of a Salesman
---Tropic of Cancer*
---Tropic of Capricorn*
---Children of Darkness
---Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
---The Left Hand of Darkness
---Where I'm Calling From
---Spanking the Maid
---White Noise
---Libra
---Running Dog
---Mao II
---Little, Big
---Aegypt communication from author
---Love and Sleep
---Daemonomania*
---Endless Things*
---Tatlin!
---The Early Motion
---The Central Motion
---The Book of Daniel
---World's Fair
---The Living End
---In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
---Omensetter's Luck
---Riddley Walker
---A Canticle for Leibowitz*
---Angels
---Fiskadoro
---Jesus' Son
---Blood Meridian
---Suttree
---Child of God
---Ironweed
---The Albany Cycle
---Song of Solomon
---The Women of Brewster Place
---Them
---The Moviegoer
---The Little Disturbances of Man
---V.
---The Crying of Lot 49
---Gravity's Rainbow
---Envy, or Yiddish in America (pdf)
---The Messiah of Stockholm
---Mumbo Jumbo
---Portnoy's Complaint
---My Life as a Man
---Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue
---The Counterlife
---Patrimony
---Operation Shylock
---Solo Faces
---Light Years
---Dog Soldiers
---A Flag for Sunrise
---The Floating Opera
---The End of the Road
---The Sot-Weed Factor
---Alphabetical Africa
---How German Is It
---Eclipse Fever
---I Am the Dust Under Your Feet
---Forty Stories
---The Dead Father
---On Wings of Song
---The Mosquito Coast
---The Witches of Eastwick
---Cat's Cradle
---Forgetting Elena
---Nocturnes for the King of Naples
---Time Remaining
---Pulp*
---Selected poems*
---Modern Baptists
---Collected Poems
---Selected Longer Poems
---Sphere: The Form of a Motion
---The Double Dream of Spring
---Houseboat Days
---Selected Poems
---Flow Chart
---Hotel Lautréamont
---And the Stars Were Shining
---American Buffalo
---Speed-the-Plow
---Selected poems*
---Streamers
---Seven Plays
---Fences
---Joe Turner's Come and Gone
---Collected Earlier Poems
---Living Together: New and Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---From the First Nine
---The Changing Light at Sandover
---Selected Poems
---Above the River: The Complete Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---New and Selected Poems
---The One Day
---Old and New Poems
---Poems
---Untitled Subjects
---Findings
---Reflections on Espionage
---Selected Poetry
---Tesserae
---No Nature: New and Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---Selected Poems
---The Continuous Life
---Dark Harbor
---The World of the Ten Thousand Things
---Dimensions of History
---The Double Invention of Komo
---Selected Poems
---Elaine's Book
---Boleros
---Westward
---The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected
---New Selected Poems
---River Writing: An Eno Journal
---The Rest of the Way
---A Call in the Midst of the Crowd
---The Revisionist
---Selected Poems
---Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems update from author
---Earthly Measures
---Angels in America
...And below my very own entries for the 21st century! [well, I don't pretend to canonize them yet, but I do enjoy their work...]download a pdf excerpt
[more to come...]
- The Pulitzer Prizes [listing]
- The Man Booker Prizes [listing]
- The National Book Awards [winners & finalists, since 1950]
- The Orange Prize
- Premio Strega, Italy [The Strega Literary Prizes, since 1947]
- Premio Campiello [The Campiello Prize in Venice, Italy]
- Premi letterari italiani [other Italian Literary Awards etc.]
- French Literary Awards
- Australian and Commonwealth Literary Awards and Prizes
- Other Literary Prizes, Awards & Medals
To buy books in Italian from Italy, click left logo. To buy books from Amazon use right box.
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- The Cambridge History of English & American Literature (online with search engine).
- Bartleby.com, publisher of literature, reference and verse online (free).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Source: Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Appendixes. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. © 1994 by Harold Bloom.
--Many thanks to Wikipedia for providing essential biographical references.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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...and now check out the
CODEX OCCIDENTIUM LIBRORUM
Labels: Western Canon
14/01/09 - On sabbatical for a while now...
and opening a new blog on Kabbalah and Higher States of Consciousness, if ever...
