Universality

Noble ideas

Dignified language

Restraint

Clarity

Objectivity

The importance of structure

An edifying purpose

Homer

• • The Iliad

  • The Odyssey

The Bible

• • "Genesis" 

  • "Exodus" 

  • "Matthew"

Sophocles

• • Antigone

  • Oedipus Rex

Euripides

• • Medea

Aristotle 

• • "On the Nature of Tragedy" 

Plato

• • "The Apology" 

  • "The Allegory of the Cave"

Moliere

• • Tartuffe

  • The Misanthrope

Racine

• • Phaedra

John Milton

• • "L'Allegro"

  • "Il Penseroso"

  • "On His Blindness"

  • Paradise Lost (excerpts)

Alexander Pope

• • "An Essay on Man"

  • "An Essay on Criticism"

  • "The Rape of the Lock"

Jonathan Swift

• • Gulliver's Travels

Voltaire

• • Candide

Truth and actuality

Detail

Character portrayal

Psychology

Objectivity

Lack of sentimentality

Chaucer

• • The Canterbury Tales

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• • Crime and Punishment

Leo Tolstoy

• • Anna Karenina

Anton Chekov

• • The Cherry Orchard

Ernest Hemingway

• • The Sun Also Rises

Henrik Ibsen

• • Hedda Gabler

  • A Doll's House

Emotions and passion

Imagination and wonder

The variety and power of Nature

The individual

Freedom and revolution

Dreams and idealism

Mystery and the supernatural

Experimentation with form

Spontaneity

Anonymous

• • Beowulf

Bocaccio

• • The Decameron

Rabelais

• • Gargantua

Cervantes

• • Don Quixote

Shakespeare

• • Hamlet

  • King Lear

Goethe 

• • Faust

Hawthorne

• • The Scarlet Letter

Bronte

• • Jane Eyre

Hugo

• • Les Miserables

Shakespeare

• • The Ballads - Scottish and British Sonnets

Robert Burns

• • "To a Mouse"

  • "John Anderson, My Jo"

  • "A Red, Red, Rose"

William Blake

• • "A Poison Tree"

  • "The Sick Rose"

  • "London"

  • "The Chimney Sweep"

William Wordsworth

• • "Tintern Abbey"

  • "My Heart Leaps Up"

  • "London, 1802"

  • "The World Is Too Much With Us"

  • "I Wondered Lonely As a Cloud"

  • "Ode on Intimations of Immortality"

  • Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• • "Kubla Khan"

  • "The Frost at Midnight"

  • "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Lord Byron

• • "Sonnet on Chillon"

  • "When We Two Parted"

  • "Maid of Athens"

  • "The Isles of Greece"

  • "She Walks in Beauty"

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• • "Ode to the West Wind"

  • "To a Skylark"

  • "Ozymandias"

John Keats

• • "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer"

  • "Ode to a Nightingale"

  • "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

  • "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be"

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• • "Ulysses"

Robert Browning

• • "My Last Duchess"

  • "Pipps's Song"

  • "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"

Appeals to the senses

Mood and effects

Vagueness and ambiguity

Momentary insights

Impressions of setting, plot, and character

Emphasis on color and light

Emotions and feelings

Sensations into words

Henry James

• • The American

Joseph Conrad

• • Heart of Darkness

  • The Secret Sharer

  • "The Lagoon"

Katherine Mansfield

• • "Bliss"

Kate Chopin

• • "Story of an Hour"

  • The Awakening

Subjective responses

Inner reality

Abstract and mystical idea

Symbols and masks

Man and society in chaos

Creation of new worlds

James Joyce

• • Dubliners

Eugene O'Neill

• • Desire Under the Elms

  • The Hairy Ape

  • The Iceman Cometh

T.S. Eliot

• "The Hollow Men"

• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Franz Kafka

• The Metamorphosis

• the Trial

Realism to its extreme

Fact and detail

Social awareness and reform

A broad spectrum of subjects, both positive and negative

Man as animal in society

Scientific impartiality

Tennessee Williams

• • A Streetcar Named Desire

  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Frank Norris

• • The Octopus

  • McTeague

Stephen Crane

• • Maggie

  • A Girl of the Streets

  • "The Red Badge of Courage"

Upton Sinclair

• • The Jungle

John Steinbeck

• "Of Mice and Men"

• "The Grapes of Wrath"

Theodore Dreiser

• Sister Carrie

• An American Tragedy

an outgrowth of romanticism

Man's alienation

Takes eistentialsim one step further into the realm of fractrured reality

Shirley Jackson

• The Lottery

Kurt Vonnegut

• Harrison Bergeron

Ray Bradbury

• A Sound of Thunder

• The Veldt

• There Will Come Soft Rains

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Ernest Hemingway

• The Killers

Joyce Carol Oates

• Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Graham Greene

• The Destructors