-
Aeschylus
- Greek drama; 2nd speaking character; concept of conflict
- Oresteia/Agamemnon/Chophori/Eumenides
-
Aristophanes
- father of Greek comedy;
- Lysistrata/The Clouds/The Birds
-
Aristotle
- Concept of criticism
- The Poetics
-
Euripides
- technique of deus ex machina
- The Trojan Women/Helen/The Bacchae
-
Homer
- non literate culture; 1st works of Western Lit
- Odyssey/Illiad
-
Ovid
- Publius Ovidius Naso
- erotic verse
- Metamorphoses/Love's Remedy
-
Plato
- father of Western Philosophy
- Republic/Apology/Symposium
-
Sappho
verse fragments; early Greek poetry
-
Sophocles
- 3rd speaking character; Greek drama from religious commentary->basic human interaction
- Oedipus/Tyrannus/Antigone/Electra
-
Virgil
- Publius Vegilius Maro
- pastoral poem; concept of civic virtue
- The Aeneid
-
Francis Bacon
- founder of inductive method of modern science; philosophical writings
- Essays/The New Atlantis
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Giovannie Boccaccio
- vernacular in classically focused lit
- The Decameron
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Geoffrey Chaucer
- brought lit ->middle class
- The Canterbury Tales/Troilus and Criseyde
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Miguel de Cervantes
- 1st modern novel
- Don Quixote
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Ben Jonson
- English playwright
- Every Man in His Humour
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Nicolo Machiavelli
- self interest ruler=Machiavellian government(The Prince)
- The Prince/La Madrigola
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Christopher Marlowe
- 1st historical drama and English tragedy
- The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus/Edward the Second
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
John Milton
- Puritan poet; allegorical religious epics
- Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Francesco Petrarch
- love poetry;popularized humanism theme
- The Canzoniere
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Francois Rabelais
- Satiric narrative
- Gargantua/Pantagruel
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
William Shakespeare
- greatest English poet and dramatist
- Hamlet/King Lear/Macbeth/Romeo Juliet/Twelfth Night/Richard III/Julius Caesar/Much Ado About Nothing/Sonnets
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
Edmund Spenser
- popularized use of allegory
- The Faerie Queen/Amoretti
- Middle Ages/Renaissance
-
John Dryden
- heroic couplet
- Alexander's Feast/Heroic Stanzas
- Neoclassical Period
-
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
Moliere
- literary convo and intro everyday speech to theatre
- Don Juan/Tartuffe/The Misanthrope
- Neoclassical Period
-
Jean Racine
- lyric poetry based on Greek/Roman lit
- Andromaque/Bernice and Phaedre
- Neoclassical Period
-
Joseph Addison
- poet, critic, and playwright; essays marked political free thinking of his time
- The Tattler/The Spectator/Cato
- The Enlightenment
-
William Blake
- visual artist/poet; defied neoclassical convention c/ subjects of truth and beauty
- Songs of Innocence/Songs of Experience
- The Enlightenment
-
Benjamin Franklin
- Scientist, educator, abolitionist, philosopher, economist, political theorist, and statesman; defined the colonial New world; American Enlightenment
- Poor Richard's Almanac/Observations on the Increase of Mankind/numerous essays and state papers
- The Enlightenment
-
Alexander Pope
- Classicist; formulated rules for poetry; satirized British social circles
- The Dunciad/The Rape of the Lock
- The Enlightenment
-
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Libertine; prose inspired the French Revolution
- Social Contract/The New Heloise
- The Enlightenment
-
Jonathan Swift
- direct style; clear sharp prose; critical wit
- Gulliver's Travels/Tale of a Tub
- The Enlightenment
-
Francois-Marie Arouet
Voltaire
- Progressive philosopher/freethinker; synthesized French and English critical theory
- Candide/Zadig
- The Enlightenment
-
Jane Austen
- manners and middle class English society novels
- Sense and Sensibility/Pride and Prejudice
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Charles Baudelaire
- French Symbolist poet
- Flowers of Evil(Les Fleurs du Mal)
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Charlotte Bronte
- Victorian novelist; sister to Emily Bronte
- Jane Eyre
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Emily Bronte
- Victorian novelist
- Wuthering Heights
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- English poet; married to Robert Browning
- Sonnets from the Portuguese/Aurora Leigh
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Robert Browning
- English poet; married to Elizabeth Browning
- Bells and Pomegranates
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
George Gordon (Lord) Byron
- major Romantic movement figure; inspired Byronic hero
- Don Juan/classic poetry
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- lit critic of Romantic period
- Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Joseph Conrad
- born-Ukraine to Polish parents; English post colonialist novelist
- Heart of Darkness/Lord Jim
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Charles Dickens
- English novelist
- Great Expectations/Oliver Twist
-
Emily Dickinson
- American poet;
- Because I Could Not Stop for Death
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Russian novelist
- Crime and Punishment/Notes From the Underground
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
George Eliot
- English author
- Mill on the Floss
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Gustave Flaubert
- French novelist
- Madame Bovary
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Nathaniel Hawthorne
- American transcendentalist
- The Scarlet Letter/House of the Seven Gables
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Henrik Ibsen
- Norwegian playwright; Expressionist movement
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Franz Kafka
- existentialist novelist
- The Metamorphosis/The Castle
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
John Keats
- most versatile of the Romantics
- Hyperion/On a Grecian Urn
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
D. H. Lawrence
- English novelist
- Lady Chatterly's Lover/The Rainbow
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Herman Melville
- American transcendentalist
- Moby-Dick/Billy Budd
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Edgar Allan Poe
- American transcendentalist; macabre issues of insanity and horror
- Fall of the House of Usher/The Tell-Tale Heart/The Raven
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Christina Rosetti
- English poet
- Goblin Market
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Mary Shelley
- Romantic novelist; liberal social/political views underscored her work; sister to Percy Shelley
- Frankenstein/The Last Man
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Romantic poet;mastered metaphor and metrical form; brother to Mary Shelley
- Adonais
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Harriet Beecher Stowe
- American novelist; most important novel of abolitionist movement
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Henry David Thoreau
- American transcendentalist and social theorist
- Walden
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Leo Nilolayevich Tolstoy
- Russian novelist
- War and Peace/Anna Karenina
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Mark Twain
(Samuel Clemens)
- American novelist; essayist; satirist
- Huckleberry Finn/ Tom Sawyer
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Walt Whitman
- American poet
- Leaves of Grass
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Oscar Wilde
- English novelist; dramatist; social critic
- The Importance of Being Earnest/Picture of Dorian Gray
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
William Wordsworth
- Romantic poet; broke neoclassical theory; nature poetry
- The Prelude/Lyrical Ballads
- Romantic, Victorian, and Realists
-
Dante Alighieri
- founded modern European lit; terza-rima
- Divine Comedy/The Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso
- The Middle Ages and Renaissance
-
James Baldwin
- American poet and novelist
- The Fire Next Time
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Samuel Beckett
- Irish-born; French playwright and novelist; existentialism and absurdity themes
- Waiting for Godot/Happy Days
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Elizabeth Bishop
- American poet
- Collected Works
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
e. e. Cummings
- non-traditional forms of poetry
- Tulips and Chimneys
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
T. S. Eliot
- Christian poet and theorist
- The Waste Land
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
William Faulkner
- author of American South
- The Sound and the Fury/Absalom! Absalom!
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Robert Frost
- American poet
- Birches/The Road Not Taken
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Allen Ginsberg
- American Beat poet
- Howl
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Nadine Gordimer
- South African novelist
- A Sport of Nature
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Ernest Hemingway
- lean prose; ardently masculine themes and characters
- The Old Man and the Sea/A Farewell to Arms
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Langston Hughes
- Harlem Renaissance poet
- Collected Works
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Zora Neale Hurston
- American novelist and folklorist; Their Eyes Were Watching God/Tell My Horse
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
James Joyce
- Modernist; novelist of Ireland; stream of conscious and non linear narratives
- Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man/Ulysses
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Jack Kerouac
- American Beat poet and novelist
- On the Road/Dharma Bums
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Harper Lee
- American writer
- To Kill a Mockingbird (only novel)
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Sinclair Lewis
- American novelist and social critic
- Babbitt/Elmer/Gantry
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Arthur Miller
- American playwright
- Death of a Salesman/The Crucible
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Henry Miller
- Controversial American novelist
- The Tropic of Cancer/The Tropic of Capricorn
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Toni Morrison
- American novelist
- The Bluest Eye/Song of Solomon/Beloved
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
Vladimir Nabokov
- Russian novelist
- Lolita/Invitation to a Beheading
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
-
V.S. Naipaul
- Post Colonialist novelist; born in Trinidad of Indian parents; raised in England
- Enigma of Arrival/House for Mr. Biswas
- Modernism and Post-Modernism
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