Nigel Beale’s Comprehensive Literary Criticism Reading List
Back in 2004 Dan Green wrote a post on ‘books intended to enlighten interested readers–all interested readers–about the nature and possibilities of literature, in effect to show them how to read fiction, poetry, and serious drama more profitably…’ He listed ten such books:
Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis
Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn
William Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970
Following Dan’s dictum, I’d like to offer up a more comprehensive list, containing critical works which exemplify outstanding commentary, and guidance; which explain what we have read and what it means, and tell us what we should read, and why. Most take the form of essays and reviews. This is a work in progress, so please, if you see gaps, and have titles that you think deserve inclusion, please let me know (for online resources, check this out).
Plato. Republic (Bks II, III, VII, X), Ion. Phaedrus. Symposium
Aristotle. Poetics. Rhetoric, Bk I, Ch2 3; Bk II, Ch 1; Bk III, Ch 2
Horace The Art of Poetry.
Longinus On the Sublime.
Plotinus. On Intellectual Beauty.
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy
Augustine On Christian Teaching De Ordine; De Musica
John Cassian Conference XIV, “On Spiritual Knowledge”
Goeffrey of Vinsauf The New Poetics
Hugh of St. Victor The Didascalicon
Dante. Letter to Can Grande della Scala. Il Convivo, Bk2 Ch 1.
Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks (selections)
Marsilio Ficino Commentary on Plato’s Symposium
Marsilio Ficino Commentary on Plato’s Symposium
Boccaccio. Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, Bk 14. “In Defense of Poetry”
Christine de Pisan “Querrelle della Rose”
Thomas Acquinas. Summa Theologica, "Question 1."
Sidney. An Apology for Poetry.
Nicholas Boileau The Art of Poetry
Henry Fielding Introductory chapters to the eighteen books of Tom Jones
Alexander Pope. Essay on Criticism.
Giambattista Vico The New Science (Bks. 1-3)
Gotthold Lessing Laocoön (Chs. 2,3,16)
Rousseau Essay on the Origin of Language
Gotthold Lessing Laocoön (Chs. 2,3,16)
Rousseau Essay on the Origin of Language
David Hume On the Standard of Taste.
Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgement Books 2,3. "Analytic of the Beautiful" and "Analytic of the Sublime."
Schiller. On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Hegel Phenom. of Spirit, "The Master-Slave Dialect." Introduction to The Philosophy of Fine Art. Hegel: On the Arts
Dryden. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.
Addison The Spectator, No. 62, "True and False Wit." Nos. 411-421 (esp. "No. 412, "On the Sublime.")
Edmund Burke "Of the Sublime" and "The Sublime and Beautiful Compared" A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas…
Samuel Johnson The Rambler, No. 4, "On Fiction". Preface to Shakespeare, Rasselas (Bk. 10)
Wordsworth. Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Coleridge. Biographia Literaria, Chpt 1, 4, 7, 13, 14,15,17,18
Shelley A Defense of Poetry.
Keats The Letters of John Keats
William Hazlitt The Spirit of the Age, The English Comic Writers
Stendhal Racine et Shakespeare
Madame de Stael, Essay on Fiction
Emerson. The Poet
Karl Marx The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Grundrisse
Thomas Carlyle English and Other Critical Essays
T. B. Macaulay Critical and Historical Essays
Walter Bagehot Literary Studies
Leslie Stephens Hours in a Library
Victor Hugo Preface to Cromwell
Hippolyte Taine Selections from History of English Literature
A. Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. "On Truth and Lies in their Non-Moral Sense"
Edgar Allan Poe. The Philosophy of Composition.
Baudelaire. The Painter of Modern Life. On the Essence of Laughter, The Salon of 1859;
Anthony Trollope Autobiography
Walter Pater. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, "Preface" and "Conclusion."
Matthew Arnold. "The Study of Poetry," "The Function of Criticism …." "On Translating Homer". "On the modern element of Lit".
Corneille. Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place.
Sigmund Freud. "The Structure of the Unconscious"
Leo Tolstoy What is Art?”
Henry James. The Art of Fiction/the Novel. Pref. The American, Notebooks
Oscar Wilde. Pref to The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Critic as Artist.
Stephen Mallarmé "Crise de vers"
Marcel Proust Contre Sainte-Beuve
D. H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature
John Ruskin Ruskin as Literary Critic
G. Wilson Knight The Wheel of Fire
A.C. Bradley Shakespearian Tragedy
Arnold Bennett Literary Taste
W.B. Yeats Essays and Introductions
T. S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood, To Criticize the Critic, On Poetry and Poets, Selected Prose (Trad. and the Individual Talent)
Virginia Woolf. A Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own. Letters, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
Edith Wharton The Writing of Fiction
Ezra Pound ABC of Reading, Literary Essays
Samuel Beckett Proust
John Middleton Murray The Problem of Style, Keats and Shakespeare, Selected Criticisms
John Dewey Art as Experience
L.C. Knight Explorations
Herbert Read English Prose Style
I. A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism
E. M. Forster Aspects of the Novel
Edwin Muir The Structure of the Novel
Rebecca West The Strange Necessity: Essays etc
Edmund Wilson Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow, Classics and Commercials
Q.D. Leavis Fiction and the Reading Public
Alfred Kazan On Native Grounds
Gilbert Highet The Classical Tradition
R.S. Crane The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry
Kenneth Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form, A Grammar of Motives
F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition, Revaluation
Jean Paul Satre What is Literature?
Robert Riddell A Treatise on the Novel
Northrop Frye Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Well-Tempered Critic, The Educated Imagination
H. L. Mencken A Mencken Chrestomathy1 &2 [Criticism Essays]
W.H. Auden The Dyers Hand
Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination
Leon Edel The Psychological Novel
Frank O’Connor Mirror in the Roadway
John Bayley Characters of Love
Isaiah Berlin The Hedgehog and the Fox
Cyril Connolly Enemies of Promise
Monroe Beardsley Aesthetics
William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral
Robert Graves The White Goddess
Auerbach Mimesis (chap.1, 14 & 18)
W.K. Wimsatt The Verbal Icon
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Leslie Fiedler Love and Death in the American Novel
Wayne Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction, The Rhetoric of Irony
George Orwell The Collected Essays
Frank O’Connor The Lonely Voice
Flannery O’Connor Mystery and Manners
Cleanth Brooks The Well Wrought Urn
Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero. S/Z, The Semiotic Challenge,
Clifton Fadiman Any Number Can Play
Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature; Literature
V.S. Pritchett The Living Novel, In My Good Books, and Books in General
Walter Benjamin Illuminations
Elaine Showalter A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing
Randall Jarrell Poetry and the Age
Frank Kermode Romantic Image, A Sense of an Ending
Harold Bloom The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon
George Steiner Language & Silence, Real Presences, No Passion Spent, After Babel
Raymond Williams The English Novel: from Dickens to Lawrence
Eudora Welty The Eye of the Story: Essays
Helen Gardner The Comp. of the Four Quartets, The Business of Criticism
Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method
Terry Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction
Philip Larkin Required Writing
Susan Sontag Reader
Milan Kundera The Art of the Novel
Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
John Hollander Rhyme’s Reason
B. R. Meyers A Reader’s Manifesto:
Joseph Brodsky Less than One
Maurice Blanchot The Station Hill Blanchot Reader
Jonathan Culler On Deconstruction
Walter Allen The English Novel
David Lodge The Language of Fiction, The Art of Fiction
Gabriel Josipovici Essays "The Singer on the Shore"
Garrick Davis (Ed.) Praising it New: The Best of New Criticism
John Carey What Good are the Arts?
James Wood The Irresponsible Self, The Broken Estate, How Fiction Works
***
And before anyone says anything…please stay tuned for a Literary Theory reading list.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:38 AM
A few I find essential:
Conrad Aiken: Collected Criticism
Jane Hirshfield: Nine Gates
Goethe: any of the essays on poetry and art
Muriel Rukeyser: The Life of Poetry
Thomas M. Disch: The Castle of Indolence
Burton Raffel: How to Read a Poem
February 1st, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Umberto Eco – On Literature
Denis Donoghue – The Practise of Reading
August 19th, 2009 at 4:42 PM
The list is all too drearily predictable – surely critics like W.W.Robson and Christopher Ricks are infinitely superior in sensitivity, originality and intelligence than the dreary theorising of Lodge , Eagleton, Barthes, Culler et al. + why the ignorance about the great late Victorians and Edwardians – e.g Edward Dowden [Studies of Literature] What about Livingston Lowes on Coleridge and John Press ?