Western Literary Canon in Context

The Bible and the Literary Canon

The Bible as Literature

The Epic of Gilgamesh — Western Literature?

Homer's Odyssey and the Seafaring Hero

The Context of Athenian Tragedy

Herodotus Versus Thucydides

Socrates and Plato — Writing and Reality

Aristotle's Poetics — How We Tell Stories

Virgil's Aeneid and the Epic of Empire

Love Interest — Ovid's Metamorphoses

St. Augustine Saves the Classics

All Literature Is Consolation — Boethius

Beowulf — The Fortunate Survivor

King Arthur, Politics, and Sir Gawain

Dante and the Canon of Christian Literature

Boccaccio — Ancient Masters, Modern Rivals

Chaucer — The Father of English Literature

"Man for All Seasons" — More and His Utopia

Hamlet — English Literature Goes Global

Brave New Worlds — Shakespeare's the Tempest

Cervantes's Don Quixote and the Novel

The Rebel as Hero — Milton's Paradise Lost

Voice of an Age — Voltaire's Candide

Pride and Prejudice — Women in the Canon

Nationalism and Culture in Goethe's Faust

Melville's Moby-Dick and Global Literature

Cult Classic — The Charterhouse of Parma

East Meets West in War and Peace

Joyce's Ulysses and the Avant-Garde

The Magic Mountain and Modern Institutions

Mrs. Dalloway and Post-War England

T.S. Eliot's Divine Comedy

Faulkner and the Great American Novel

Willa Cather and Mosaics of Identity

Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings — Literature?

Postcolonialism — The Empire Writes Back