CODEX OCCIDENTIUM LIBRORUM
Il Canone Occidentale
The Western Canon

~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~

This is to be a mortal
And seek the things beyond mortality

Lord Byron

For a few dollars more...
This list below should be set in titanium and stuck as a plaque onto any spacecraft surfing the Cosmos
to show mankind’s best aesthetic accomplishments in the Belles Lettres…but can aliens read?


THE WESTERN CANON
ACCORDING TO HAROLD BLOOM
&
MY GOOD SELF


Canon
> go to CONTENTS >>

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?

Bookcover-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:

Ancient Libraries
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...

The Ancient Alexandria Library (reconstr.)
The Ancient Library of Alexandria of Egypt (reconstruction)

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]

A Hall of the Alexandria Library (reconstruction)
THE THEOCRATIC AGE

Harlod Bloom - sketch

"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
  • Homer

  • Iliad
    Odyssey
  • Hesiod

  • Works and Days
    Theogony
  • Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman

  • Pindar

  • Odes
  • Aeschylus

  • Oresteia
    Seven Against Thebes
    Prometheus Bound
    Persians
    Suppliant Women

  • Sophocles

  • Oedipus the King
    Oedipus at Colonus
    Antigone
    Electra
    Ajax
    Women of Trachis
    Philoctetes

  • Euripides

  • Cyclops
    Heracles
    Alcestis
    Hecuba
    Bacchae
    Orestes
    Andromache
    Medea
    Ion
    Hippolytus
    Helen
    Iphigenia at Aulis

  • Aristophanes

  • The Birds
    The Clouds
    The Frogs
    Lysistrata
    The Knights
    The Wasps
    The Assemblywomen

  • Herodotus

  • The Histories
  • Thucydides

  • The Peloponnesian Wars
  • The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)

  • Plato

  • Dialogues
  • Aristotle

  • Poetics
    Ethics


    HELLENISTIC GREEKS
  • Menander

  • The Girl from Samos
  • "Longinus"

  • On the Sublime
  • Callimachus

  • Hymns and Epigrams
  • Theocritus

  • Idylls
  • Plutarch

  • Lives
    Moralia

  • "Aesop"

  • Fables
  • Lucian

  • Satires

    THE ROMANS
  • Plautus

  • Pseudolus
    The Braggart Soldier
    The Rope
    Amphitryon

  • Terence

  • The Girl from Andros
    The Eunuch
    The Mother-in-Law

  • Lucretius
    The Way Things Are
  • Cicero
    On the Gods
  • Horace
    Odes
    Epistles
    Satires

  • Persius

  • Satires
  • Catullus

  • Attis and Other Poems
  • Virgil

  • Aeneid
    Eclogues
    Georgics

  • Lucan

  • Pharsalia
  • Ovid

  • Metamorphoses
    The Art of Love
    Heroides

  • Juvenal

  • Satires
  • Martial

  • Epigrams
  • Seneca

  • Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
  • Petronius

  • Satyricon
  • Apuleius

  • The Golden Ass

    Illumination
    The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
  • Saint Augustine

  • City of God
    Confessions

  • The Koran (Al-Qur'an)

  • The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
    The Poetic Edda

  • Snorri Sturluson
    The Prose Edda
    The Nibelungen Lied

  • Wolfram von Eschenbach

  • Parzival
  • Chrétien de Troyes

  • Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
    Beowulf
    The Poem of the Cid

  • Christine de Pisan

  • The Book of the City of Ladies
  • Diego de San Pedro

  • Prison of Love (Cárcel de amor)


    THE ARISTOCRATIC AGE


    Harlod Bloom - sketch

    "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
  • Dante
    The Divine Comedy
    The New Life

  • Petrarch

  • Lyric Poems
    ---Selections

  • Giovanni Boccaccio

  • The Decameron
  • Matteo Maria Boiardo

  • Orlando Innamorato
  • Ludovico Ariosto

  • Orlando Furioso
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti

  • Sonnets and Madrigals
  • Niccolò Machiavelli

  • The Prince
    The Mandrake, a Comedy
    (Mandragola)
  • Leonardo da Vinci

  • Notebooks
  • Baldassare Castiglione

  • The Book of the Courtier
  • Gaspara Stampa

  • Sonnets and Madrigals
  • Giorgio Vasari

  • Lives of the Painters
  • Benvenuto Cellini

  • Autobiography
  • Torquato Tasso

  • Jerusalem Delivered
  • Giordano Bruno
    ---The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Spaccio de la bestia trionfante)
  • Tommaso Campanella
    Poems
    The City of the Sun

  • Giambattista Vico

  • Principles of a New Science
  • Carlo Goldoni

  • The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni)
  • Vittorio Alfieri

  • Saul

    Portugal
  • Luis de Camoëns

  • The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas)
  • Antònio Ferreira

  • Poetry

    SPAIN
  • Jorge Manrique

  • Coplas
  • Fernando de Rojas

  • La Celestina
    Lazarillo de Tormes

  • Francisco de Quevedo

  • Visions
    ---Satirical Letter of Censure
  • Fray Luis de León

  • Poems
  • St John of the Cross
    Poems
  • Luis de Góngora

  • Sonnets
    Soledades

  • Miguel de Cervantes

  • Don Quixote
    Exemplary Stories

  • Lope de Vega

  • La Dorotea
    Fuente Ovejuna
    Lost in a Mirror (El Castigo sin venganza)
    The Knight of Olmedo

  • Tirso de Molina

  • The Trickster of Seville
  • Pedro Calderón de la Barca
    Life is a Dream
    The Mayor of Zalamea
    The Mighty Magician
    The Doctor of His Own Honor

  • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  • Poems

    ENGLAND and Scotland
  • Geoffrey Chaucer

  • The Canterbury Tales
    Troilus and Criseyde

  • Sir Thomas Malory

  • Le Morte D'Arthur
  • William Dunbar

  • Poems
  • John Skelton

  • Poems
  • Sir Thomas More

  • Utopia
  • Sir Thomas Wyatt

  • ---Poems
  • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
    Poems
  • Sir Philip Sidney

  • The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
    Astrophel and Stella
    An Apology for Poetry

  • Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke

  • Poems
  • Edmund Spenser

  • The Faerie Queene
    The Minor Poems

  • Sir Walter Ralegh

  • Poems
  • Christopher Marlowe

  • Poems and Plays
  • Michael Drayton
    Poems
  • Samuel Daniel

  • Poems
    A Defence of Ryme

  • Thomas Nashe

  • The Unfortunate Traveller
  • Thomas Kyd

  • The Spanish Tragedy
  • William Shakespeare

  • ---Plays and Poems (the whole opus) --- [main link here]
  • Thomas Campion

  • Songs
  • John Donne
    Poems
    Sermons

  • Ben Jonson
    Poems, Plays, and Masques
  • Francis Bacon

  • Essays
  • Robert Burton

  • The Anatomy of Melancholy
  • Sir Thomas Browne

  • ---Religio Medici
    Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
    The Garden of Cyrus

  • Thomas Hobbes

  • Leviathan
  • Robert Herrick

  • Poems
  • Thomas Carew

  • ---Poems
  • Richard Lovelace

  • Poems
  • Andrew Marvell

  • Poems
  • George Herbert

  • The Temple
  • Thomas Traherne

  • Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
  • Henry Vaughan

  • Poetry
  • John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

  • Poems
  • Richard Crashaw

  • Poems
  • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

  • Plays
  • George Chapman

  • Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
  • John Ford

  • 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
  • John Marston

  • The Malcontent
  • John Webster

  • The White Devil
    The Duchess of Malfi

  • Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

  • The Changeling
  • Cyril Tourneur

  • The Revenger's Tragedy
  • Philip Massinger

  • ---A New Way to Pay Old Debts
  • John Bunyan

  • The Pilgrim's Progress
  • Izaak Walton

  • ---The Compleat Angler
  • John Milton

  • Paradise Lost
    Paradise Regained
    Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems
    Samson Agonistes
    Areopagitica

  • John Aubrey

  • Brief Lives
  • Jeremy Taylor

  • Holy Dying
  • Samuel Butler

  • Hudibras
  • John Dryden

  • Poetry and Plays
    Critical Essays

  • Thomas Otway

  • Venice Preserv'd
  • William Congreve
    The Way of the World
    Love for Love

  • Jonathan Swift

  • A Tale of a Tub
    Gulliver's Travels
    Shorter Prose Works
    Poems

  • Sir George Etherege

  • The Man of Mode
  • Alexander Pope

  • ---Poems
  • John Gay

  • The Beggar's Opera
  • James Boswell

  • Life of Johnson
    Journals

  • Samuel Johnson

  • Works
  • Edward Gibbon

  • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • Edmund Burke

  • A Philosophical Enquiry into...the Sublime and Beautiful
    Reflections on the Revolution in France

  • Maurice Morgann
    An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
  • William Collins

  • Poems
  • George Farquhar
    The Beaux' Strategem
    The Recruiting Officer

  • William Wycherley

  • The Country Wife
    The Plain Dealer

  • Christopher Smart

  • Jubilate Agno
    A Song to David

  • Oliver Goldsmith

  • The Vicar of Wakefield
    She Stoops to Conquer
    The Traveller
    The Deserted Village

  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  • The School of Scandal
    The Rivals

  • William Cowper

  • Poetical Works
  • George Crabbe

  • Poetical Works
  • Daniel Defoe

  • Moll Flanders
    Robinson Crusoe
    A Journal of the Plague Year

  • Samuel Richardson

  • Clarissa
    Pamela
    Sir Charles Grandison

  • Henry Fielding

  • Joseph Andrews
    The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

  • Tobias Smollett

  • The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
    The Adventures of Roderick Random

  • Laurence Sterne

  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

  • Fanny Burney

  • Evelina
  • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

  • The Spectator

    Alexandria's Library
    FRANCE
  • Jean Froissart

  • Chronicles
    The Song of Roland

  • François Villon

  • Poems
  • Michel de Montaigne

  • Essays
  • François Rabelais

  • Gargantua and Pantagruel
  • Marguerite de Navarre

  • The Heptameron
  • Joachim Du Bellay

  • The Regrets
  • Maurice Scève

  • Délie
  • Pierre Ronsard

  • Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
  • Philippe de Commynes

  • Memoirs
  • Agrippa d'Aubigné

  • Les Tragiques
  • Robert Garnier

  • Mark Antony (Marc Antoine)
    The Jewesses

  • Pierre Corneille

  • The Cid
    Polyeucte
    Nicomède
    Horace
    Cinna
    Rodogune

  • François de La Rochefoucauld

  • Maxims
  • Jean de La Fontaine

  • Fables
  • Molière

  • 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

  • Blaise Pascal

  • Pensées
  • Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

  • Funerary Orations
  • Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

  • The Art of Poetry
    Lutrin

  • Jean Racine

  • Phaedra
    Andromache
    Britannicus
    Athaliah

  • Pierre Carlet de Marivaux

  • Seven Comedies
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  • The Confessions
    Émile
    La Nouvelle Héloïse

  • Voltaire

  • Zadig
    Candide
    Letters on England
    The Lisbon Earthquake

  • Abbé Prévost

  • Manon Lescaut
  • Madame de La Fayette

  • The Princess of Cleves
  • Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort

  • Products of the Perfected Civilization
  • Denis Diderot

  • Rameau's Nephew
  • Choderlos de Laclos

  • Dangerous Liaisons

    GERMANY
  • Erasmus

  • In Praise of Folly
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  • 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

  • Friedrich Schiller

  • The Robbers
    Mary Stuart
    Wallenstein
    Don Carlos
    On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature

  • Gotthold Lessing

  • Laocoön
    Nathan the Wise

  • Freidrich Hölderlin
    Hymns and Fragments
    Selected Poems

  • Heinrich von Kleist

  • Five Plays
    Stories



    THE DEMOCRATIC AGE


    Harlod Bloom - sketch

    "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
  • Ugo Foscolo

  • On Sepulchres
    Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
    Odes and The Graces

  • Alessandro Manzoni

  • The Betrothed
    On the Historical Novel

  • Giacomo Leopardi

  • Essays and Dialogues
    Poems
    The Moral Essays

  • Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

  • Roman Sonnets
  • Giosué Carducci
  • Nobel Laureate
    Hymn to Satan
    Barbarian Odes
    Rhymes and Rhythms

  • Giovanni Verga

  • Little Novels of Sicily
    Mastro Don Gesualdo
    The House by the Medlar Tree
    The She-Wolf and Other Stories

  • Grazia Deledda* Nobel Laureate

  • While the East Wind Blows*
    (see also all her works in Italian downloadable at Liber Liber)

    SPAIN and Portugal
  • Gustavo Adolpho Bécquer

  • Poems
  • Benito Pérez Galdós

  • Fortunata and Jacinta
  • Leopoldo Alas (Clarín)

  • La Regenta
  • José Maria de Eça de Queirós

  • The Maias

    FRANCE
  • Benjamin Constant

  • Adolphe
    The Red Notebook

  • François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand

  • Attala
    René
    The Genius of Christianity

  • Alphonse de Lamartine

  • Meditations
  • Alfred de Vigny

  • Chatterton
    Poems
  • Victor Hugo

  • The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems
    Les Misérables
    Notre-Dame of Paris
    William Shakespeare
    The Toilers of the Sea
    The End of Satan
    God

  • Alfred de Musset

  • Poems
    Lorenzaccio

  • Gérard de Nerval

  • The Chimeras
    Sylvie
    Aurelia

  • Théophile Gautier

  • Mademoiselle de Maupin
    Enamels and Cameos

  • Honoré de Balzac

  • 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

  • Stendhal

  • On Love
    The Red and the Black
    The Charterhouse of Parma

  • Gustave Flaubert

  • Madame Bovary
    Sentimental Education
    Salammbô
    A Simple Soul

  • George Sand
    The Haunted Pool
  • Charles Baudelaire

  • Flowers of Evil
    Paris Spleen

  • Stéphane Mallarmé

  • Selected Poetry and Prose
  • Paul Verlaine

  • Selected Poems
  • Arthur Rimbaud
    ---Complete Works---
    [Kinkazzo's PORTAL RIMBAUD - whole opus in 3 languages!]
  • Tristan Corbière

  • Les Armours Jaunes
  • Jules Laforgue

  • Selected Writings
  • Guy de Maupassant

  • Selected Short Stories
  • Émile Zola

  • Germinal
    L'Assommoir
    Nana


    SCANDINAVIA
  • Henrik Ibsen

  • Brand
    Peer Gynt
    Emperor and Galilean
    Hedda Gabler
    The Master Builder
    The Lady from the Sea
    When We Dead Awaken

  • August Strindberg

  • To Damascus
    Miss Julie
    The Father
    The Dance of Death
    The Ghost Sonata
    A Dream Play


    GREAT BRITAIN
  • Robert Burns

  • Poems
  • William Blake

  • Complete Poetry and Prose
  • William Wordsworth

  • Poems
    The Prelude

  • Sir Walter Scott

  • Waverley
    The Heart of Midlothian
    Redgauntlet
    Old Mortality

  • Jane Austen
    Pride and Prejudice
    Emma
    Mansfield Park
    Persuasion

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  • Poems and Prose
  • Dorothy Wordsworth

  • The Grasmere Journal
  • William Hazlitt

  • Essays and Criticism
  • Lord Byron

  • Don Juan
    Poems

  • Walter Savage Landor

  • Poems
    Imaginary Conversations

  • Thomas De Quincey

  • Confessions of an English Opium Eater
    Selected Prose

  • Charles Lamb

  • Essays
  • Maria Edgeworth

  • Castle Rackrent
  • John Galt

  • The Entail
  • Elizabeth Gaskell

  • Cranford
    Mary Barton
    North and South

  • James Hogg

  • The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
  • Charles Maturin

  • Melmoth the Wanderer
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • Poems
    A Defence of Poetry

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  • Frankenstein
  • John Clare

  • Poems
  • John Keats

  • Poems and Letters
  • Thomas Lovell Beddoes

  • Death's Jest-Book
    Poems

  • George Darley

  • Nepenthe
    Poems

  • Thomas Hood
    Poems
  • Thomas Wade

  • Poems
  • Robert Browning

  • Poems
    The Ring and the Book

  • Charles Dickens

  • 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

  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  • Poems
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  • Poems and Translations
  • Matthew Arnold

  • Poems
    Essays
  • Arthur Hugh Clough

  • Poems
  • Christina Rossetti

  • Poems
  • Thomas Love Peacock

  • Nightmare Abbey
    Gryll Grange

  • Gerald Manley Hopkins

  • Poems and Prose
  • Thomas Carlyle

  • Selected Prose
    Sartor Resartus
  • John Ruskin

  • Modern Painters
    The Stones of Venice
    Unto This Last
    The Queen of the Air

  • Walter Pater

  • Studies in the History of the Renaissance
    Appreciations
    Imaginary Portraits
    Marius the Epicurean

  • Edward FitzGerald

  • The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
  • John Stuart Mill

  • On Liberty
    Autobiography
  • John Henry Newman

  • Apologia pro Vita Sua
    A Grammar of Assent
    The Idea of a University

  • Anthony Trollope

  • The Barsetshire Novels
    The Palliser Novels
    Orley Farm
    The Way We Live Now

  • Lewis Carroll

  • Complete Works
  • Edward Lear

  • Complete Nonsense
  • George Gissing

  • New Grub Street
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne

  • Poems and Letters
  • Charlotte Brontë

  • Jane Eyre
    Villette

  • Emily Brontë

  • Poems
    Wuthering Heights

  • William Makepeace Thackeray

  • Vanity Fair
    The History of Henry Esmond

  • George Meredith

  • Poems
    The Egoist

  • Francis Thompson

  • Poems
  • Lionel Johnson

  • Poems
  • Robert Bridges

  • Poems
  • Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  • Collected Poems
    The Man Who Was Thursday

  • Samuel Butler

  • Erewhon
    The Way of All Flesh

  • W. S. Gilbert

  • Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan
    Bab Ballads

  • Wilkie Collins

  • The Moonstone
    The Woman in White
    No Name

  • Coventry Patmore

  • Odes
  • James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)

  • The City of the Dreadful Night
  • Oscar Wilde

  • Plays
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    The Artist as Critic
    Letters

  • John Davidson

  • Ballads and Songs
  • Ernest Dowson

  • Complete Poems
  • George Eliot

  • Adam Bede
    Silas Marner
    The Mill on the Floss
    Middlemarch
    Daniel Deronda

  • Robert Louis Stevenson

  • Essays
    Kidnapped
    Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Treasure Island
    The New Arabian Nights
    The Master of Ballantrae
    Weir of Hermiston

  • William Morris

  • Early Romances
    Poems
    The Earthly Paradise
    The Well at the World's End
    News from Nowhere

  • Bram Stoker

  • Dracula
  • George Macdonald

  • Lilith
    At the Back of the North Wind


    GERMANY
  • Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg)

  • Hymns to the Night
    Aphorisms
  • Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  • Fairy Tales
  • Eduard Mörike

  • Selected Poems
    Mozart on His Way to Prague
  • Theodor Storm

  • Immensee
    Poems

  • Gottfried Keller

  • Green Henry
    Tales
  • E. T. A. Hoffmann

  • The Devil's Elixir
    Tales
  • Jeremias Gotthelf

  • The Black Spider
  • Adalbert Stifter

  • Indian Summer
    Tales
  • Friedrich Schlegel

  • Criticism and Aphorisms
  • Georg Büchner

  • Danton's Death
    Woyzeck

  • Heinrich Heine

  • Complete Poems
  • Richard Wagner

  • The Ring of the Nibelung
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

  • The Birth of Tragedy
    Beyond Good and Evil
    On the Genealogy of Morals
    The Will to Power

  • Theodor Fontane

  • Effi Briest
  • Stefan George

  • Selected Poems

    RUSSIA
  • Aleksandr Pushkin

  • Complete Prose Tales
    Complete Poetry
    Eugene Onegin
    Narrative Poems
    Boris Godunov

  • Nikolay Gogol

  • The Complete Tales
    Dead Souls
    The Government Inspector
    (The Inspector-General)
  • Mikhail Lermontov

  • Narrative Poems
    A Hero of Our Time
  • Sergey Aksakov

  • A Family Chronicle
  • Aleksandr Herzen

  • My Past and Thoughts
    From the Other Shore

  • Ivan Goncharov

  • The Frigate Pallada
    Oblomov
  • Ivan Turgenev

  • A Sportsman's Notebook
    A Month in the Country
    Fathers and Sons
    On the Eve
    First Love

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Notes from the Underground
    Crime and Punishment
    The Idiot
    The Possessed (The Devils)

    The Brothers Karamazov
    Short Novels
  • Leo Tolstoy

  • The Cossacks
    War and Peace
    Anna Karenina
    A Confession
    The Power of Darkness
    Short Novels

  • Nikolay Leskov

  • Tales
  • Aleksandr Ostrovsky

  • The Storm
  • Nikolay Chernyshevsky

  • What is to Be Done?
  • Aleksandr Blok

  • The Twelve and Other Poems
  • Anton Chekhov

  • The Tales
    The Major Plays


    THE UNITED STATES
  • Washington Irving

  • The Sketch Book
  • William Cullen Bryant

  • Collected Poems
  • James Fenimore Cooper

  • The Deerslayers
  • John Greenleaf Whittier

  • Collected Poems
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Nature
    Essays, first and second series
    Representative Men
    The Conduct of Life
    Journals
    Poems

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Complete Poems
  • Walt Whitman

  • Leaves of Grass, first edition
    Leaves of Grass, third edition
    The Complete Poems
    Specimen Days

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • The Scarlet Letter
    Tales and Sketches
    The Marble Faun
    Notebooks

  • Herman Melville

  • Moby-Dick
    The Piazza Tales
    Billy Budd
    Collected Poems
    Clarel

  • Edgar Allan Poe

  • Poetry and Tales
    Essays and Reviews
    The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
    Eureka

  • Jones Very

  • Essays and Poems
  • Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

  • The Cricket and Other Poems
  • Henry David Thoreau

  • Walden
    Poems
    Essays

  • Richard Henry Dana, Jr

  • Two Years Before the Mast
  • Frederick Douglass

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  • Selected Poems
  • Sidney Lanier

  • Poems
  • Francis Parkman

  • France and England in North America
    The California and Oregon Trail

  • Henry Adams

  • The Education of Henry Adams
    Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres

  • Ambrose Bierce

  • Collected Writings
  • Louisa May Alcott

  • Little Women
  • Charles W. Chesnutt

  • The Short Fiction
  • Kate Chopin

  • The Awakening
  • William Dean Howells

  • The Rise of Silas Lapham
    A Modern Instance

  • Stephen Crane

  • The Red Badge of Courage
    Stories and Poems

  • Henry James

  • 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

  • Harold Frederic

  • The Damnation of Theron Ware
  • Mark Twain

  • 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

  • William James

  • The Varieties of Religious Experience
    Pragmatism

  • Frank Norris

  • The Octopus
  • Sarah Orne Jewett

  • The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
  • Trumbull Stickney

  • Poems



    THE CHAOTIC AGE: A CANONICAL PROPHECY


    Harlod Bloom - sketch

    "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!]


    ITALY
  • Luigi Pirandello

  • Naked Masks: Five Plays
  • Gabriele D'Annunzio

  • Maia: In Praise of Life
  • Dino Campana

  • Orphic Songs
  • Umberto Saba

  • Stories and Recollections
    Poems
  • Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  • The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)
  • Giuseppe Ungaretti

  • Selected Poems
    The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems
  • Eugenio Montale Nobel Laureate

  • The Storm and Other Things: Poems
    The Occasions: Poems
    Cuttlefish Bones: Poems
    Otherwise: Last and First Poems
    The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays

  • Salvatore Quasimodo Nobel Laureate

  • Selected Writings: Poems and Discourse on Poetry
  • Tommaso Landolfi

  • Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
  • Leonardo Sciascia

  • Day of the Owl (Il Giorno della Civetta)
    Equal Danger
    The Wine-Dark Sea: Thirteen Stories
  • Pier Paolo Pasolini

  • Poems
  • Cesare Pavese

  • Hard Labor: Poems
    Dialogues with Leucò
  • Primo Levi

  • If Not Now, When?
    Collected Poems
    The Periodic Table
  • Italo Svevo

  • The Confession of Zeno
    As a Man Grows Older
  • Giorgio Bassani

  • The Heron
  • Natalia Ginzburg

  • Family
  • Elio Vittorini

  • Women of Messina
  • Alberto Moravia

  • 1934
  • Andrea Zanzotto

  • Selected Poetry
  • Italo Calvino

  • Invisible Cities
    The Baron in the Trees
    If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
    t zero
  • Antonio Porta

  • Kisses from Another Dream: Poems

    SPAIN
  • Miguel de Unamuno

  • Three Exemplary Novels
    Our Lord Don Quixote
  • Antonio Machado

  • Selected Poems
  • Juan Ramón Jiménez Nobel Laureate

  • Invisible Reality: Poems
  • Pedro Salinas

  • My Voice Because of You: Poems
  • Jorge Guillén

  • Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet
  • Vicente Aleixandre Nobel Laureate

  • A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems
  • Federico Garcia Lorca

  • Selected Poems
    Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernardo Alba
  • Rafael Alberti

  • The Owl's Insomnia: Poems
  • Luis Cernuda

  • Selected Poems
  • Miguel Hernández

  • Selected Poems
  • Blas de Otero

  • Selected Poems
  • Camilo José Cela Nobel Laureate

  • The Hive
  • Juan Goytisolo

  • Space in Motion

    CATALONIA
  • Carles Ribá

  • Selected Poems
  • J. V. Foix

  • Selected Poems
  • Joan Perucho

  • Natural History
  • Merce Rodoreda

  • The Time of the Doves
  • Pere Gimferrer

  • Selected Poems
  • Salvador Espríu

  • La Pell de Brau: Poems

    PORTUGAL
  • Fernando Pessoa

  • The Keeper of Sheep
    Poems
    Selected Poems
    Always Astonished: Selected Poems
    The Book of Disquiet
  • Jorge de Sena

  • Selected Poems
  • José Saramago Nobel Laureate

  • Baltasar and Blimunda
  • José Cardoso Pires

  • Ballad of Dogs' Beach
  • Sophia de Mello Breyner

  • Selected Poems
  • Eugénio de Andrade

  • Selected Poems

    FRANCE
  • Anatole France Nobel Laureate

  • Penguin Island
    Thaïs
  • Alain-Fournier
    Le Grand Meaulnes
  • Marcel Proust

  • Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)
  • Andre Gide Nobel Laureate
    The Immoralist
    Corydon
    Lafcadio's Adventure (The Caves of the Vatican)
    The Journals
  • Colette

  • Collected Stories
    Retreat from Love
  • Georges Bataille

  • Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel)
  • Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  • Journey to the End of Night
  • René Daumal

  • Mount Analogue
  • Jean Genet

  • Our Lady of the Flowers
    The Thief's Journal
    The Balcony
  • Jean Giraudoux

  • Four Plays
  • Alfred Jarry

  • Selected Works
  • Jean Cocteau

  • The Infernal Machine and Other Works
  • Guillaume Apollinaire

  • Selected Writings
  • André Breton

  • Poems
    Manifestoes of Surrealism
  • Paul Valéry

  • The Art of Poetry
    Selected Writings
  • René Char

  • Poems
  • Paul Éluard

  • Selected Poems
  • Louis Aragon

  • Selected Poems
  • Jean Giono

  • The Horseman on the Roof (other works)
  • Michel Leiris

  • Manhood
  • Raymond Radiguet

  • Count d'Orgel's Ball
  • Jean-Paul Sartre Nobel Laureate

  • No Exit
    Nausea
    Saint Genet
    The Words
    The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert
  • Simone de Beauvoir

  • The Second Sex
  • Albert Camus Nobel Laureate

  • The Stranger
    The Plague
    The Fall
    The Rebel

  • Henri Michaux

  • Selected Writings
  • Edmond Jabès

  • The Book of Questions
    Selected Poems

  • Saint-John Perse Nobel Laureate

  • Anabasis
    Birds
    Exile and Other Poems

  • Pierre Reverdy

  • Selected Poems
  • Tristan Tzara

  • Seven Dada Manifestoes
  • Max Jacob

  • Selected Poems
  • Pierre-Jean Jouve

  • Selected Poems
  • Francis Ponge

  • Things: Selected Writings
  • Jacques Prévert

  • Paroles
  • Philippe Jacottet

  • Selected Poems (translated by Paul Auster)
  • Charles Péguy

  • The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
  • Benjamin Péret

  • Selected Poems
  • André Malraux

  • The Conquerors
    The Royal Way
    Man's Fate
    Man's Hope
    The Voices of Silence

  • François Mauriac Nobel Laureate
    Therese
    The Desert of Love
    The Woman of the Pharisees

  • Jean Anouilh

  • Becket
    Antigone
    Eurydice
    The Rehearsal
  • Eugène Ionesco

  • The Bald Soprano
    The Chairs
    The Lesson
    Amédée
    Victims of Duty
    Rhinoceros

  • Maurice Blanchot

  • Thomas the Obscure
  • Pierre Klossowski

  • The Laws of Hospitality
    The Baphomet

  • Raymond Roussel

  • Locus Solus
  • Antonin Artaud

  • Selected Writings
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss

  • Tristes Tropiques
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet

  • The Voyeur
    Jealousy
    In the Labyrinth
    The Erasers
    Project for a Revolution in New York
    For a New Novel
  • Nathalie Sarraute

  • The Use of Speech
    The Planetarium
  • Claude Simon Nobel Laureate

  • The Grass
    The Wind
    The Flanders Road

  • Marguerite Duras

  • The Lover
    Four Novels
  • Robert Pinget

  • Fable
    The Libera Me Domine

    That Voice
  • Michel Tournier

  • The Ogre
    Friday
  • Marguerite Yourcenar

  • Coup de Grace
    Memoirs of Hadrian
  • Jean Follain

  • Transparence of the World: Poems
  • Yves Bonnefoy

  • Words in Stone (selected poems)

    GREAT BRITAIN and Ireland
  • William Butler Yeats Nobel Laureate

  • The Collected Poems
    Collected Plays
    A Vision
    Mythologies

  • George Bernard Shaw Nobel Laureate

  • Major Critical Essays
    Heartbreak House
    Pygmalion
    Saint Joan
    Major Barbara
    Back to Methuselah

  • John Millington Synge

  • Collected Plays
  • Sean O'Casey

  • Juno and the Paycock
    The Plough and the Stars
    The Shadow of a Gunman
  • George Douglas Brown

  • House with the Green Shutters
  • Thomas Hardy

  • 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
  • Rudyard Kipling Nobel Laureate

  • Kim
    Collected Stories
    Puck of Pook's Hill
    Complete Verse

  • A. E. Housman

  • Collected Poems
  • Max Beerbohm

  • Zuleika Dobson
    Seven Men and Two Others

  • Joseph Conrad

  • Lord Jim
    The Secret Agent
    Nostromo
    Under Western Eyes
    Victory

  • Ronald Firbank

  • Five Novels
  • Ford Madox Ford

  • Parade's End
    The Good Soldier
  • W. Somerset Maugham

  • Collected Short Stories
    The Moon and Sixpence
  • John Cowper Powys

  • Wolf Solent
    A Glastonbury Romance
  • Saki (H. H. Munro)

  • The Short Stories
  • H. G. Wells

  • The Science Fiction Novels
  • David Lindsay

  • A Voyage to Arcturus
  • Arnold Bennett

  • The Old Wives' Tale
  • Walter De la Mare

  • Collected Poems
    Memoirs of a Midget
  • Wilfred Owen

  • Collected Poems
  • Isaac Rosenberg

  • Collected Poems
  • Edward Thomas

  • Collected Poems
  • Robert Graves

  • Collected Poems
    King Jesus
  • Edwin Muir

  • Collected Poems
  • David Jones

  • In Parenthesis
    The Anathemata
  • John Galsworthy Nobel Laureate
    The Forsyte Saga
  • E. M. Forster

  • Howards End
    A Passage to India
  • Frank O'Connor

  • Collected Stories
  • D. H. Lawrence

  • Complete Poems
    Studies in Classic American Literature
    Complete Short Stories
    Sons and Lovers
    The Rainbow
    Women in Love

  • Virginia Woolf

  • Mrs. Dalloway
    To the Lighthouse

    Orlando: A Biography
    The Waves
    Between the Acts

  • James Joyce

  • Dubliners
    Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    Ulysses
    Finnegans Wake
  • Samuel Beckett Nobel Laureate

  • Murphy
    Watt
    Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
    Waiting for Godot
    Endgame
    Krapp's Last Game
    How It Is

  • Elizabeth Bowen

  • Collected Stories
  • J. G. Farrell

  • The Siege of Krishnapur
  • Henry Green

  • Nothing
    Loving
    Party Going
  • P. G. Wodehouse
  • *
    The Jeeves stories*
  • Evelyn Waugh

  • A Handful of Dust
    Scoop
    Vile Bodies
    Put Out More Flags
    Sword of Honour (trilogy)*
  • Anthony Burgess

  • Nothing Like the Sun
    Earthly Powers*
  • G. B. Edwards
    The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
  • Iris Murdoch

  • The Good Apprentice
    Bruno's Dream
  • J. R. R. Tolkien*

  • The Lord of the Rings*
  • Graham Greene

  • Brighton Rock
    The Heart of the Matter
    The Power and the Glory
  • Christopher Isherwood

  • The Berlin Stories
  • Norman Douglas

  • South Wind
  • Aldous Huxley

  • Collected Essays
    Antic Hay
    Point Counter Point
    Brave New World
  • Lawrence Durrell

  • Alexandria Quartet
  • William Golding Nobel Laureate

  • Pincher Martin
  • Doris Lessing Nobel Laureate

  • The Golden Notebook
  • Mervyn Peake

  • The Gormenghast Trilogy
  • Jeanette Winterson

  • The Passion
  • W. H. Auden

  • Collected Poems (on Vagheggiando - bilingual)
    The Dyer's Hand
  • Roy Fuller

  • Collected Poems
  • Gavin Ewart

  • Selected Poems
  • Basil Bunting

  • Collected Poems
  • William Empson

  • Collected Poems
    Milton's God
    Some Versions of Pastoral
  • George Wilson Knight

  • The Wheel of Fire
    The Burning Oracle
  • R. S. Thomas

  • Poems
  • Frank Kermode

  • The Sense of an Ending
  • Stevie Smith

  • Collected Poems
  • F. T. Prince

  • Collected Poems
  • Philip Larkin

  • Collected Poems
  • Donald Davie

  • Selected Poems
  • Geoffrey Hill

  • Collected Poems
  • Jonathan Spence

  • The Death of Woman Wang
    The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
  • Elizabeth Jennings

  • Selected Poems
  • Keith Douglas

  • The Complete Poems
  • Hugh MacDiarmid

  • Complete Poems
  • Louis MacNeice

  • Collected Poems
  • Dylan Thomas

  • The Poems
  • Nigel Dennis

  • Cards of Identity
  • Seamus Heaney Nobel Laureate

  • Selected Poems: 1969-1987
    Field Work
    Station Island
  • Thomas Kinsella

  • Peppercanister Poems
  • Paul Muldoon

  • Selected Poems
  • John Montague

  • Selected Poems
  • John Arden

  • Plays
  • Joe Orton

  • The Complete Plays
  • Flann O'Brien

  • The Dalkey Archive
    The Third Policeman
  • Tom Stoppard

  • Travesties
  • Harold Pinter Nobel Laureate

  • The Caretaker
    The Homecoming

  • Edward Bond

  • The Fool
    Saved
  • George Orwell

  • Collected Essays
    1984
  • Edna O'Brien

  • A Fanatic Heart


    GERMANY
  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  • Poems and Verse Plays
    Selected Prose
    Selected Plays and Libretti

  • Rainer Maria Rilke

  • Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies)
    The Sonnets to Orpheus
    The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
    New Poems: First Part and Other Part
  • Hermann Broch

  • The Sleepwalkers
    The Death of Virgil
    Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time
  • Georg Trakl

  • Selected Poems
  • Gottfried Benn

  • Selected Poems
  • Franz Kafka

  • Amerika
    The Complete Stories
    The Blue Octavo Notebook
    The Trial
    The Diaries
    The Castle
    Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms
  • Bertolt Brecht

  • Poems, 1913-1956
    The Threepenny Opera
    The Good Woman of Setzuan
    Mother Courage and Her Children
    Galileo
    The Caucasian Chalk Circle

  • Arthur Schnitzler

  • Plays and Stories
  • Frank Wedekind

  • Lulu Plays
    Spring Awakening
  • Karl Krauss

  • The Last Days of Mankind
  • Günter Eich

  • Moles
  • Thomas Mann Nobel Laureate

  • The Magic Mountain
    Stories of Three Decades
    Joseph and His Brothers
    Doctor Faustus
    Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
  • Alfred Döblin

  • Berlin Alexanderplatz
  • Hermann Hesse Nobel Laureate

  • The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
    Narcissus and Goldmund
  • Robert Musil

  • Young Törless
    The Man Without Qualities
  • Joseph Roth

  • The Radetzky March
  • Paul Celan

  • Poems (Italian translations on Vagheggiando)
  • Thomas Bernhard

  • Woodcutters (see also Five Stories)
  • Heinrich Böll Nobel Laureate

  • Billiards at Half-Past Nine
  • Ingeborg Bachmann

  • In the Storm of Roses
  • Hans Magnus Enzensberger

  • Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems
  • Walter Benjamin

  • Illuminations
  • Robert Walser

  • Selected Stories
  • Christa Wolf

  • Cassandra
  • Peter Handke

  • Slow Homecoming
  • Max Frisch

  • I'm Not Stiller
    Man in the Holocene
  • Günter Grass Nobel Laureate

  • The Tin Drum
    The Flounder
  • Friedrich Dürrenmatt

  • The Visit
  • Johannes Bobrowski

  • Shadow Lands

    RUSSIA
  • Anna Akhmatova

  • Poems
  • Leonid Andreyev

  • Selected Tales
  • Andrey Bely

  • Petersburg
  • Osip Mandelshtam

  • Selected Poems
  • Velimir Khlebnikov

  • The King of Time
  • Vladimir Mayakovsky

  • The Bedbug and Selected Poetry
  • Mikhail Sholokhov* Nobel Laureate

  • And Quiet Flows the Don*
  • Mikhail Bulgakov

  • The Master and the Margarita
  • Mikhail Kuzmin

  • Alexandrian Songs
  • Maksim Gorky

  • Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev
    Autobiography

  • Ivan Bunin Nobel Laureate

  • Selected Stories
  • Isaac Babel

  • Collected Stories
  • Boris Pasternak Nobel Laureate

  • Doctor Zhivago
    Selected Poems (on Vagheggiando in Italian)
  • Yury Olesha

  • Envy (see also short story “The Cherry Seed”)
  • Marina Tsvetayeva

  • Selected Poems
  • Mikhail Zoshchenko

  • Nervous People and Other Satires
  • Andrei Platonov

  • The Foundation Pit
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Nobel Laureate

  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    The Cancer Ward
    The Gulag Archipelago
    August 1914
  • Joseph Brodsky Nobel Laureate

  • A Part of Speech: Poems (pdf)

    SCANDINAVIA
  • Isak Dinesen

  • Winter's Tales
    Seven Gothic Tales

  • Martin Andersen Nexø

  • Pelle the Conqueror
  • Knut Hamsun Nobel Laureate

  • Hunger
    Pan

  • Sigrid Undset Nobel Laureate

  • Kristin Lavransdatter
  • Gunnar Ekelöf

  • Guide to the Underworld (some poems in translation)
  • Tomas Tranströmer

  • Selected Poems
  • Pär Lagerkvist Nobel Laureate

  • Barabbas
  • Lars Gustafsson

  • Selected Poems

    SERBO-CROAT
  • Ivo Andric Nobel Laureate
    The Bridge on the Drina
  • Vasko Popa

  • Selected Poems
  • Danilo Kis

  • A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

    CZECH
  • Karel Capek

  • War with the Newts
    R.U.R.
  • Vaclav Havel

  • Largo Desolato
  • Milan Kundera

  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Jaroslav Seifert Nobel Laureate

  • Selected Poetry
  • Miroslav Holub

  • Supposed to Fly

    POLISH
  • Bruno Schulz

  • The Street of Crocodiles
    Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

  • Czeslaw Milosz Nobel Laureate

  • Selected Poems
  • Witold Gombrowicz

  • Three Novels
  • Stanislaw Lem

  • The Investigation
    Solaris
  • Zbigniew Herbert

  • Selected Poems
  • Adam Zagajewski

  • Tremor

    HUNGARIAN
  • Attila József

  • Perched on Nothing's Branch
  • Ferenc Juhasz

  • Selected Poems
  • Laszlo Németh

  • Guilt

    MODERN GREEK
  • Konstantinos P. Kavafis
    Collected Poems (on Vagheggiando in Italian)
  • George Seferis Nobel Laureate

  • Collected Poems
  • Nikos Kazantzakis

  • The Greek Passion
    The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

  • Yannis Ritsos

  • Exile and Return (Moonlight Sonata)
  • Odysseus Elytis Nobel Laureate

  • What I Love: Selected Poems
  • Angelos Sikelianos

  • Selected Poems

    YIDDISH
  • Sholem Aleichem

  • Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
    The Nightingale

  • Mendele Mokher Seforim

  • The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third
  • I. L. Peretz

  • Selected Stories
  • Jacob Glatstein

  • Selected Poems
  • Moshe-Leib Halpern

  • Selected Poems
  • H. Leivick (Leivick Halpern)

  • Selected Poems
  • Israel Joshua Singer

  • The Brothers Ashkenazi
    Yoshe Kalb
  • Chaim Grade

  • The Yeshiva
  • S. Ansky

  • The Dybbuk
  • Mani Leib

  • Selected Poems

  • Sholem Asch

  • East River
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer Nobel Laureate

  • Collected Stories
    In My Father's Court
    The Manor, the Estate, the Family Moskat
    Satan in Goray


    HEBREW
  • Hayyim Nahman Bialik

  • Shirot Bialik: The Epic Poems
  • S. Y. Agnon Nobel Laureate

  • In the Heart of the Seas
    Twenty-One Stories
  • Aharon Appelfeld

  • The Immortal Bartfuss
    Badenheim 1939
  • Yaakov Shabtai

  • Past Continuous
  • Yehuda Amichai

  • Selected Poetry
    Travels
  • A. B. Yehoshua

  • A Late Divorce
  • Amos Oz

  • A Perfect Peace
  • T. Carmi

  • At the Stone of Losses
  • Nathan Zach

  • Selected Poem
  • Dahlia Ravikovitch

  • A Dress of Fire
  • Dan Pagis

  • Selected Poems
  • David Shahar

  • The Palace of Shattered Vessels
  • David Grossman

  • See Under: Love
  • Yoram Kaniuk

  • His Daughter

    ARABIC
  • Naguib Mahfuz Nobel Laureate

  • Midaq Alley
    Fountain and Tomb
    Miramar
  • Adunis

  • Selected Poems
  • Mahmud Darwish

  • The Music of Human Flesh
  • Taha Husayn

  • An Egyptian Childhood (Pierre Cachia's study)

    LATIN AMERICA
  • Rubén Dário

  • Selected Poetry
  • Jorge Luis Borges

  • The Aleph and Other Stories
    Dreamtigers (The Maker)
    Ficciones
    Labyrinths
    A Personal Anthology
  • Alejo Carpentier

  • Explosion in a Cathedral
    The Lost Steps
    Reasons of State
    The Kingdom of This World
  • Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  • Three Trapped Tigers
    View of Dawn in the Tropics

  • Severo Sarduy

  • Maitreya
  • Reinaldo Arenas

  • The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando
  • Pablo Neruda Nobel Laureate

  • Canto General
    Residence on Earth

    Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
    Fully Empowered
    Selected Poems
  • Nicolás Guillén

  • Selected Poems
  • Octavio Paz Nobel Laureate

  • The Collected Poems
    The Labyrinth of Solitude

  • César Vallejo

  • Selected Poems
    Spain, Take This Cup from Me
  • Miguel Angel Asturias Nobel Laureate

  • Men of Maize
  • José Lezama Lima

  • Paradiso
  • José Donoso

  • The Obscene Bird of Night
  • Julio Cortázar

  • Hopscotch
    All Fires the Fire
    Blow-up and Other Stories
  • Gabriel García Márquez Nobel Laureate

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
    Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Mario Vargas Llosa

  • The War of the End of the World
  • Carlos Fuentes

  • A Change of Skin
    Terra Nostra

  • Carlos Drummond de Andrade

  • Travelling in the Family

    THE WEST INDIES
  • C. L. R. James

  • The Black Jacobins
    The Future in the Present

  • V. S. Naipaul Nobel Laureate

  • A Bend in the River
    A House for Mr. Biswas
  • Derek Walcott Nobel Laureate

  • Collected Poems
  • Wilson Harris
    The Guyana Quartet
  • Michael Thelwell

  • The Harder They Come
  • Aimé Césaire

  • Collected Poetry

    AFRICA
  • Chinua Achebe

  • Things Fall Apart
    Arrow of God
    No Longer at Ease
  • Wole Soyinka Nobel Laureate

  • A Dance of the Forest
  • Amos Tutuola

  • The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town
  • Christopher Okigbo

  • Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder
  • John Pepper Clark (-Bekederemo)

  • Casualties: Poems
  • Ayi K. Armah

  • The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
  • Wa Thiong'o Ngugi

  • A Grain of Wheat
  • Gabriel Okara

  • The Fisherman's Invocation
  • Nadine Gordimer Nobel Laureate

  • Collected Stories
  • J. M. Coetzee Nobel Laureate

  • Foe
  • Athol Fugard

  • A Lesson from Aloes
  • Léopold S. Senghor

  • Selected Poems

    INDIA (in English)
  • R. K. Narayan

  • The Guide
  • Salman Rushdie

  • Midnight's Children
  • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  • Heat and Dust

    CANADA
  • Malcolm Lowry

  • Under the Volcano
  • Robertson Davies

  • The Deptford Trilogy
    The Rebel Angels
  • Alice Munro

  • Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
  • Northrop Frye

  • Fables of Identity
  • Anne Hébert

  • Selected Poems
  • Jay Macpherson

  • Poems Twice Told
  • Mordecai Richler*

  • Joshua Then and Now*
    Barney's Version*
  • Margaret Atwood

  • Surfacing
  • Daryl Hine

  • Selected Poems

    AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND
  • Miles (Stella) Franklin

  • My Brilliant Career
  • Katherine Mansfield

  • The Short Stories
  • A. D. Hope

  • Collected Poems
  • Patrick White Nobel Laureate

  • Riders in the Chariot
    A Fringe of Leaves
    Voss
  • Christina Stead

  • The Man Who Loved Children
  • Judith Wright

  • Selected Poems
  • Les A. Murray

  • The Rabbiter's Bounty: Collected Poems
  • Thomas Keneally

  • The Playmaker
    Schindler's List
  • David Malouf

  • An Imaginary Life
  • Kevin Hart

  • Peniel and Other Poems
  • Peter Carey

  • Oscar and Lucinda
    Illywhacker

    THE UNITED STATES
  • Edwin Arlington Robinson

  • Selected Poems
  • Robert Frost
    The Poetry
  • Edith Wharton

  • Collected Short Stories
    The Age of Innocence
    Ethan Frome
    The House of Mirth
    The Custom of the Country

  • Willa Cather

  • My Ántonia
    The Professor's House
    A Lost Lady
  • Gertrude Stein

  • Three Lives
    The Geographical History of America
    The Making of Americans

    Tender Buttons
  • Wallace Stevens

  • Collected Poems
    The Necessary Angel
    Opus Posthumous
    The Palm at the End of the Mind
  • Vachel Lindsay

  • Collected Poems
  • Edgar Lee Masters

  • Spoon River Anthology
  • Theodore Dreiser

  • Sister Carrie
    An American Tragedy
  • Sherwood Anderson

  • Winesburg, Ohio
    Death in the Woods and Other Stories
  • Sinclair Lewis Nobel Laureate

  • Babbitt
    It Can't Happen Here
  • Elinor Wylie

  • Last Poems
  • William Carlos Williams

  • Spring and All
    Paterson
    Collected Poems
  • Ezra Pound

  • Personae: Collected Poems
    The Cantos
    Literary Essays
  • Robinson Jeffers

  • Selected Poems (pdf)
  • Marianne Moore

  • Complete Poems
  • Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

  • Selected Poems
  • John Crowe Ransom

  • Selected Poems
  • T. S. Eliot Nobel Laureate

  • The Complete Poems and Plays
    Selected Essays
  • Katherine Anne Porter

  • Collected Stories
  • Jean Toomer

  • Cane
  • John Dos Passos

  • U.S.A. (see also his Three Soldiers)
  • Conrad Aiken

  • Collected Poems
  • Eugene O'Neill Nobel Laureate

  • Lazarus Laughed
    The Iceman Cometh
    Long Day's Journey Into Night
  • e. e. cummings

  • Complete Poems
  • John B. Wheelwright

  • Collected Poems
  • Robert Fitzgerald

  • Spring Shade: Poems
  • Louise Bogan

  • The Blue Estuaries: Selected Poems
  • Léonie Adams

  • Poems: A Selection
  • Hart Crane

  • Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose
  • Allen Tate

  • Collected Poems
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
    The Great Gatsby
    Tender is the Night
  • William Faulkner Nobel Laureate

  • As I Lay Dying
    Sanctuary
    Light in August
    Absalom, Absalom!
    The Sound and the Fury
    The Wild Palms
    The Collected Stories
    The Hamlet

  • Ernest Hemingway Nobel Laureate

  • 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*
  • John Steinbeck Nobel Laureate

  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • Zora Neale Hurston

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Nathanael West
    Miss Lonelyhearts
    A Cool Million
    The Day of the Locust
  • Richard Wright

  • Native Son
    Black Boy
  • Eudora Welty

  • Collected Stories
    Delta Wedding
    The Robber Bridegroom
    The Ponder Heart
  • Langston Hughes

  • Selected Poems
    The Big Sea
    I Wonder as I Wander
  • Edmund Wilson

  • The Shores of Light
    Patriotic Gore

  • Kenneth Burke

  • Counter-statement
    A Rhetoric of Motives
  • Joseph Mitchell

  • Up in the Old Hotel
  • Abraham Cahan

  • The Rise of David Levinsky
  • Kay Boyle

  • Three Short Novels
  • Ellen Glasgow

  • Barren Ground
    Vein of Iron
  • John P. Marquand

  • H. M. Pulham, Esquire (see also his The Unspeakable Gentleman)
  • John O'Hara

  • Collected Stories
    Appointment in Samarra
  • Henry Roth

  • Call It Sleep
  • Thornton Wilder

  • Three Plays
  • Robert Penn Warren

  • All the King's Men
    World Enough and Time
    Selected Poems
  • Delmore Schwartz

  • Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (pdf)
  • Weldon Kees

  • Collected Poems
  • Elizabeth Bishop

  • The Complete Poems
  • John Berryman

  • Collected Poems (pdf)
  • Paul Bowles

  • The Sheltering Sky
  • Randall Jarrell

  • Complete Poems
  • Elie Wiesel*

  • Night*
  • Charles Olson

  • The Maximus Poems
    Collected Poems

  • Robert Hayden

  • Collected Poems (pdf)
  • Robert Lowell

  • Collected Poems
  • Theodore Roethke

  • Collected Poems
    Straw for the Fire
  • James Agee

  • Permit Me Voyage
    Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
  • Jean Garrigue

  • Selected Poems
  • May Swenson

  • New & Selected Things Taking Place
    In Other Words (pdf)
  • Robert Duncan

  • Bending the Bow
  • Richard Wilbur

  • New and Collected Poems
  • Richard Eberhart

  • Collected Poems
  • M. B. Tolson

  • Harlem Gallery
  • Kenneth Koch

  • Seasons on Earth (pdf)
  • Frank O' Hara

  • Selected Poems
  • James Schuyler

  • Collected Poems
  • James Baldwin

  • The Price of the Ticket
  • Saul Bellow Nobel Laureate

  • Seize the Day
    The Adventures of Augie March
    Herzog
    More Die of Heartbreak*
  • John Cheever

  • The Stories
    Falconer*
    Bullet Park
  • Ralph Ellison

  • Invisible Man
  • Truman Capote

  • In Cold Blood
    The Grass Harp*
  • Carson McCullers

  • The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
    The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
  • Flannery O'Connor

  • Complete Stories
    The Violent Bear It Away
    Wise Blood
  • Vladimir Nabokov

  • Lolita
    Pale Fire
  • Gore Vidal

  • Myra Breckenridge
    Lincoln
  • William Styron

  • The Long March
  • J. D. Salinger

  • The Catcher in the Rye
    Nine Stories
  • Wright Morris

  • Ceremony in Lone Tree
  • Bernard Malamud

  • The Stories
    The Fixer
    Pictures of Fidelman*
  • Norman Mailer
    Advertisements for Myself
    The Executioner's Song
    Ancient Evenings
  • John Hawkes

  • The Cannibal
    Second Skin
  • William Gaddis

  • The Recognitions
  • Tennessee Williams

  • The Glass Menagerie
    A Streetcar Named Desire
    Summer and Smoke
  • Arthur Miller

  • Death of a Salesman
  • Henry Miller*

  • Tropic of Cancer*
    Tropic of Capricorn*

  • Edwin Justus Mayer

  • Children of Darkness
  • Harold Brodkey

  • Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
  • Ursula K. LeGuin

  • The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Raymond Carver

  • Where I'm Calling From
  • Robert Coover

  • Spanking the Maid
  • Don DeLillo

  • White Noise
    Libra
    Running Dog
    Mao II
  • John Crowley

  • Little, Big
    Aegypt
    Love and Sleep
  • Guy Davenport

  • Tatlin!
  • James Dickey

  • The Early Motion
    The Central Motion
  • E. L. Doctorow

  • The Book of Daniel
    World's Fair
  • Stanley Elkin

  • The Living End
  • William H. Gass

  • In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
    Omensetter's Luck
  • Russell Hoban

  • Riddley Walker
  • Walter M. Miller, Jr*

  • A Canticle for Leibowitz*
  • Denis Johnson

  • Angels
    Fiskadoro
    Jesus' Son
  • Cormac McCarthy

  • Blood Meridian
    Suttree
    Child of God
  • William Kennedy

  • Ironweed
    The Albany Cycle
  • Toni Morrison Nobel Laureate

  • Song of Solomon
  • Gloria Naylor

  • The Women of Brewster Place
  • Joyce Carol Oates

  • Them
  • Walker Percy

  • The Moviegoer
  • Grace Paley

  • The Little Disturbances of Man
  • Thomas Pynchon

  • V.
    The Crying of Lot 49
    Gravity's Rainbow
  • Cynthia Ozick

  • Envy, or Yiddish in America (pdf)
    The Messiah of Stockholm
  • Ishmael Reed

  • Mumbo Jumbo
  • Philip Roth

  • Portnoy's Complaint
    My Life as a Man
    Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue
    The Counterlife
    Patrimony
    Operation Shylock
  • James Salter

  • Solo Faces
    Light Years
  • Robert Stone

  • Dog Soldiers
    A Flag for Sunrise
  • John Barth

  • The Floating Opera
    The End of the Road
    The Sot-Weed Factor
  • Walter Abish

  • Alphabetical Africa
    How German Is It
    Eclipse Fever
    I Am the Dust Under Your Feet

  • Donald Barthelme

  • Forty Stories
    The Dead Father
  • Thomas M. Disch

  • On Wings of Song
  • Paul Theroux

  • The Mosquito Coast
  • John Updike

  • The Witches of Eastwick
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

  • Cat's Cradle
  • Edmund White

  • Forgetting Elena
    Nocturnes for the King of Naples
  • James McCourt

  • Time Remaining
  • James Wilcox

  • Modern Baptists
  • A. R. Ammons

  • Collected Poems
    Selected Longer Poems
    Sphere: The Form of a Motion
  • John Ashbery

  • The Double Dream of Spring
    Houseboat Days
    Selected Poems
    Flow Chart
    Hotel Lautréamont
    And the Stars Were Shining
  • David Mamet

  • American Buffalo
    Speed-the-Plow
  • David Rabe

  • Streamers
  • Sam Shepard

  • Seven Plays
  • August Wilson

  • Fences
    Joe Turner's Come and Gone
  • Anthony Hecht

  • Collected Earlier Poems
  • Edgar Bowers

  • Living Together: New and Selected Poems
  • Donald Justice

  • Selected Poems
  • James Merrill

  • From the First Nine
    The Changing Light at Sandover
  • W. S. Merwin

  • Selected Poems
  • James Wright

  • Above the River: The Complete Poems
  • Galway Kinnell

  • Selected Poems
  • Philip Levine

  • Selected Poems
  • Irving Feldman

  • New and Selected Poems
  • Donald Hall

  • The One Day
    Old and New Poems
  • Alvin Feinman

  • Poems
  • Richard Howard

  • Untitled Subjects
    Findings
  • John Hollander

  • Reflections on Espionage
    Selected Poetry
    Tesserae
  • Gary Snyder

  • No Nature: New and Selected Poems
  • Charles Simic

  • Selected Poems
  • Mark Strand

  • Selected Poems
    The Continuous Life
    Dark Harbor
  • Charles Wright

  • The World of the Ten Thousand Things
  • Jay Wright

  • Dimensions of History
    The Double Invention of Komo
    Selected Poems
    Elaine's Book
    Boleros
  • Amy Clampitt

  • Westward
  • Allen Grossman

  • The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected
  • Howard Moss

  • New Selected Poems
  • James Applewhite

  • River Writing: An Eno Journal
  • J. D. McClatchy

  • The Rest of the Way
  • Alfred Corn

  • A Call in the Midst of the Crowd
  • Douglas Crase

  • The Revisionist
  • Rita Dove

  • Selected Poems
  • Thylias Moss

  • Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems
    (update from author)
  • Edward Hirsch

  • Earthly Measures
  • Tony Kushner

  • Angels in America


    Joie de vivre

    ...AND MY OWN SELECTION FOR THE 21st CENTURY
    (but not canonized yet!)

    Non è bello ciò che è bello, ma è bello ciò che piace (Anonimo)

  • Paul Auster (USA)

  • Daubmir (Daubmir Nadir)
  • (It/Fr/Aus)
  • Umberto Eco (Italy)

  • Kinky Friedman (USA)

  • Linda Grant (UK)

  • Alasdair Gray (UK)

  • Steven Hall (UK)

  • Robert Harris (UK)

  • Nick Hornby (UK)

  • Howard Jacobson (UK)
  • Erica Jong (USA)

  • Ian McEwan (UK)

  • Claudio Magris (Italy)

  • Christopher Rush (UK)

  • C. J. Sansom (UK)

  • Clara Sereni (Italy)

  • Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)

  • Scarlett Thomas (UK)

  • Jonathan Tropper (USA)

  • Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Spain)


  • [and more on Kinkazzo's Kanon...]

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    The Alexandria Ancient Library in Egypt~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    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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