Context

Reading Guides

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We asked our advisors at universities and bookstores to respond to a number of questions. The following lists were compiled from their responses.

Literary Works All Students Should Have Read

The Koran
The Mahabharata
The Bible
T’Ang Dynasty Lyric Poems
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, Jorge Amado
Poetics, Aristotle
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Collected Stories, Isaac Babel
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht
The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
The Plague, Albert Camus
Don Quixote, Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad Chaudhuri
collected works of Chekov
Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois
Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Medea, Euripides
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bouvard and Pecuchet, Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
JR, William Gaddis
Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg
collected works of Henry Green
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey
Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Histories, Herodotus
The Illiad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels, Henry James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Castle, Franz Kafka
The Trial, Franz Kafka
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
The Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
Paradise Lost, John Milton
The Complete Essays, Michel De Montaigne
Beloved, Toni Morrison
collected stories of Alice Munro
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
Collected Prose, Charles Olson
The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
Metamorphoses, Ovid
The Satyricon, Petronius
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Symposium, Plato
Selected Writing of Edgar Allen Poe
Cantos, Ezra Pound
Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Manuel Puig
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
King Lear, William Shakespeare
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Oedipus, Sophocles
The Road, Wole Soyinka
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Playboy of the Western World, John Synge
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Aeneid, Virgil
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
The Great American Novel, William Carlos Williams
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Prelude, William Wordsworth
Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats
A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Most Influential Critical Books of the 20th Century

Mimesis, Erich Auerbach
S/Z, Roland Barthes
Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth
Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, Gerald Bruns
The American Novel and Its Tradition, Richard Chase
On Deconstruction, Jonathan Culler
Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot
Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler
The Order of Things, Michel Foucault
Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye
The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Art of the Novel, Henry James
The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis
The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs
The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom
Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards
Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur
Theory of Prose, Viktor Shklovsky
The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens
The Origin of the Novel, Ian Watt
Theory of Literature, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren
From Ritual to Romance, Jesse L. Weston
Spring and All, William Carlos Williams

Most Influential Novels of the 20th Century

The Sotweed Factor, John Barth
Snow White, Donald Barthelme
The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
White Noise, Don DeLillo
USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
The Lime Twig, John Hawkes
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
The Ambassadors, Henry James
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Life A User’s Manual, Georges Perec
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
V, Thomas Pynchon
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
Kora in Hell, William Carlos Williams
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

The 20th Century Novels Students Most Like

Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino
White Noise, Don DeLillo
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Neuromancer, William Gibson
The House of Breath, William Goyen
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Ulysses, James Joyce
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Mark Leyner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Impossible Object, Nicolas Mosley
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
1984, George Orwell
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Richard Powers
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed
Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
Midnight’s Children, Salmon Rushdie
Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Aberration of Starlight, Gilbert Sorrentino
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
Native Son, Richard Wright

The Pre-20th Century Novels That Most Influenced the 20th Century Novel

The Bible
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Human Comedy, Honore De Balzac
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Caroll
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
We’ll to the Woods No More, Edouard Dujardin
Middlemarch, George Elliot
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Germinal, Emile Zola

Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
The Lime Works, Thomas Bernhard
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
JR, William Gaddis
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
Ulysses, James Joyce
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Inquisitory, Robert Pinget
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino


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Context Reading Guides Untitled document We asked our advisors at universities and bookstores to respond to a number of questions. The following lists were compiled from their responses. Literary Works All Students Should Have Read The Koran The Mahabharata The Bible T’Ang Dynasty Lyric Poems Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, Jorge Amado Poetics, Aristotle Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen The Collected Stories, Isaac Babel Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett Molloy, Samuel Beckett The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch Naked Lunch, William Burroughs The Plague, Albert Camus Don Quixote, Cervantes The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad Chaudhuri collected works of Chekov Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison Medea, Euripides As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner Tom Jones, Henry Fielding The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald Bouvard and Pecuchet, Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud JR, William Gaddis Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg collected works of Henry Green The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey Being and Time, Martin Heidegger The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway Histories, Herodotus The Illiad, Homer The Odyssey, Homer Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley Portrait of a Lady, Henry James Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels, Henry James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce Ulysses, James Joyce The Castle, Franz Kafka The Trial, Franz Kafka On the Road, Jack Kerouac Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence The Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx Moby-Dick, Herman Melville The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville Paradise Lost, John Milton The Complete Essays, Michel De Montaigne Beloved, Toni Morrison collected stories of Alice Munro Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien Collected Prose, Charles Olson The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill Metamorphoses, Ovid The Satyricon, Petronius The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath Symposium, Plato Selected Writing of Edgar Allen Poe Cantos, Ezra Pound Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Manuel Puig Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton Hamlet, William Shakespeare King Lear, William Shakespeare Macbeth, William Shakespeare The Tempest, William Shakespeare Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko Oedipus, Sophocles The Road, Wole Soyinka The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein The Red and the Black, Stendhal Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift The Playboy of the Western World, John Synge Walden, Henry David Thoreau War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain The Aeneid, Virgil A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman The Great American Novel, William Carlos Williams Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf The Prelude, William Wordsworth Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn Most Influential Critical Books of the 20th Century Mimesis, Erich Auerbach S/Z, Roland Barthes Illuminations, Walter Benjamin The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, Gerald Bruns The American Novel and Its Tradition, Richard Chase On Deconstruction, Jonathan Culler Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler The Order of Things, Michel Foucault Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Art of the Novel, Henry James The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur Theory of Prose, Viktor Shklovsky The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens The Origin of the Novel, Ian Watt Theory of Literature, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren From Ritual to Romance, Jesse L. Weston Spring and All, William Carlos Williams Most Influential Novels of the 20th Century The Sotweed Factor, John Barth Snow White, Donald Barthelme The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino The Stranger, Albert Camus Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad White Noise, Don DeLillo USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford The Sportswriter, Richard Ford The Lime Twig, John Hawkes The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley The Ambassadors, Henry James Finnegans Wake, James Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce Ulysses, James Joyce One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Life A User’s Manual, Georges Perec Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon V, Thomas Pynchon Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino Kora in Hell, William Carlos Williams The Waves, Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates The 20th Century Novels Students Most Like Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess Naked Lunch, William Burroughs If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino White Noise, Don DeLillo The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald Neuromancer, William Gibson The House of Breath, William Goyen Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Ulysses, James Joyce On the Road, Jack Kerouac Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Mark Leyner One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison Impossible Object, Nicolas Mosley Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov 1984, George Orwell The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Richard Powers Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth Midnight’s Children, Salmon Rushdie Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger Aberration of Starlight, Gilbert Sorrentino A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe Native Son, Richard Wright The Pre-20th Century Novels That Most Influenced the 20th Century Novel The Bible Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen The Human Comedy, Honore De Balzac Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Caroll Don Quixote, Cervantes Bleak House, Charles Dickens We’ll to the Woods No More, Edouard Dujardin Middlemarch, George Elliot Tom Jones, Henry Fielding Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert Portrait of a Lady, Henry James Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin Moby-Dick, Herman Melville The Red and the Black, Stendhal Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne Germinal, Emile Zola Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100 Nightwood, Djuna Barnes Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett Molloy, Samuel Beckett The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett The Lime Works, Thomas Bernhard Nostromo, Joseph Conrad JR, William Gaddis The Recognitions, William Gaddis Ulysses, James Joyce One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien The Inquisitory, Robert Pinget Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino Current issue: CONTEXT # 21 CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community. CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.

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