B. The Aristocratic Age
“It is a span of five hundred years from Dante’s Divine Comedy through Goethe’s Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted….”
(Bloom, p. 534)
Italy
* Dante
The Divine Comedy
The New Life
* Petrarch
Lyric Poems
Selections
* Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron
* Matteo Maria Boiardo
Orlando Innamorato
* Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando Furioso
* Michelangelo Buonarroti
Sonnets and Madrigals
* Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince
The Mandrake, a Comedy
* Leonardo da Vinci
Notebooks
* Baldassare Castiglione
The Book of the Courtier
* Gaspara Stampa
Sonnets and Madrigals
* Giorgio Vasari
Lives of the Painters
* Benvenuto Cellini
Autobiography
* Torquato Tasso
Jerusalem Delivered
* Giordano Bruno
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
* Tommaso Campanella
Poems
The City of the Sun
* Giambattista Vico
Principles of a New Science
* Carlo Goldoni
The Servant of Two Masters
* Vittorio Alfieri
Saul
Portugal
* Luis de Camoëns
The Lusiads
* Antònio Ferreira
Poetry
Spain
* Jorge Manrique
Coplas
* Fernando de Rojas
La Celestina
* Lazarillo de Tormes
* Francisco de Quevedo
Visions
Satirical Letter of Censure
* Fray Luis de León
Poems
* St. John of the Cross
Poems
* Luis de Góngora
Sonnets
Soledades
* Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
Exemplary Stories
* Lope de Vega
La Dorotea
Fuente Ovejuna
Lost in a Mirror
The Knight of Olmedo
* Tirso de Molina
The Trickster of Seville
* Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Life is a Dream
The Mayor of Zalamea
The Mighty Magician
The Doctor of His Own Honor
* Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Poems
England and Scotland
* Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Troilus and Criseyde
* Sir Thomas Malory
Le Morte D’Arthur
* William Dunbar
Poems
* John Skelton
Poems
* Sir Thomas More
Utopia
* Sir Thomas Wyatt
Poems
* Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Poems
* Sir Philip Sidney
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
Astrophel and Stella
An Apology for Poetry
* Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Poems
* Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The Minor Poems
* Sir Walter Ralegh
Poems
* Christopher Marlowe
Poems and Plays
* Michael Drayton
Poems
* Samuel Daniel
Poems
A Defence of Ryme
* Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveller
* Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
* William Shakespeare
Plays and Poems
* Thomas Campion
Songs
* John Donne
Poems
Sermons
* Ben Jonson
Poems, Plays, and Masques
* Francis Bacon
Essays
* Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
* Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici
Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
The Garden of Cyrus
* Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
* Robert Herrick
Poems
* Thomas Carew
Poems
* Richard Lovelace
Poems
* Andrew Marvell
Poems
* George Herbert
The Temple
* Thomas Traherne
Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
* Henry Vaughan
Poetry
* John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Poems
* Richard Crashaw
Poems
* Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
Plays
* George Chapman
Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
* John Ford
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
* John Marston
The Malcontent
* John Webster
The White Devil
The Duchess of Malfi
* Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
The Changeling
* Cyril Tourneur
The Revenger’s Tragedy
* Philip Massinger
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
* John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
* Izaak Walton
The Compleat Angler
* John Milton
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
* John Aubrey
Brief Lives
* Jeremy Taylor
Holy Dying
* Samuel Butler
Hudibras
* John Dryden
Poetry and Plays
Critical Essays
* Thomas Otway
Venice Preserv’d
* William Congreve
The Way of the World
Love for Love
* Jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver’s Travels
Shorter Prose Works
Poems
* Sir George Etherege
The Man of Mode
* Alexander Pope
Poems
* John Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
* James Boswell
Life of Johnson
Journals
* Samuel Johnson
Works
* Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
* Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Enquiry into…the Sublime and Beautiful
Reflections on the Revolution in France
* Maurice Morgann
An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
* William Collins
Poems
* George Farquhar
The Beaux’ Strategem
The Recruiting Officer
* William Wycherley
The Country Wife
The Plain Dealer
* Christopher Smart
Jubilate Agno
A Song to David
* Oliver Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield
She Stoops to Conquer
The Traveller
The Deserted Village
* Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The School of Scandal
The Rivals
* William Cowper
Poetical Works
* George Crabbe
Poetical Works
* Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
A Journal of the Plague Year
* Samuel Richardson
Clarissa
Pamela
Sir Charles Grandison
* Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
* Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
The Adventures of Roderick Random
* Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
* Fanny Burney
Evelina
* Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
The Spectator
France
* Jean Froissart
Chronicles
* The Song of Roland
* François Villon
Poems
* Michel de Montaigne
Essays
* François Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel
* Marguerite de Navarre
The Heptameron
* Joachim Du Bellay
The Regrets
* Maurice Scève
Délie
* Pierre Ronsard
Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
* Philippe de Commynes
Memoirs
* Agrippa d’Aubigné
Les Tragiques
* Robert Garnier
Mark Antony
The Jewesses
* Pierre Corneille
The Cid
Polyeucte
Nicomède
Horace
Cinna
Rodogune
* François de La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
* Jean de La Fontaine
Fables
* Molière
The Misanthrope
Tartuffe
The School for Wives
The Learned Ladies
Don Juan
School for Husbands
Ridiculous Precieuses
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Miser
The Imaginary Invalid
* Blaise Pascal
Pensées
* Jacques-Bénigne Bosuet
Funerary Orations
* Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The Art of Poetry
Lutrin
* Jean Racine
Phaedra
Andromache
Britannicus
Athaliah
* Pierre Carlet de Marivaux
Seven Comedies
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Confessions
Émile
La Nouvelle Héloïse
* Voltaire
Zadig
Candide
Letters on England
The Lisbon Earthquake
* Abbé Prévost
Manon Lescaut
* Madame de La Fayette
The Princess of Cleves
* Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Products of the Perfected Civilization
* Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
* Choderlos de Laclos
Dangerous Liaisons
Germany
* Erasmus
In Praise of Folly
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust, Parts One and Two
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Egmont
Elective Affinities
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Poems
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering
Italian Journey
Verse Plays
Hermann and Dorothea
Roman Elegies
Venetian Epigrams
West-Eastern Divan
* Friedrich Schiller
The Robbers
Mary Stuart
Wallenstein
Don Carlos
On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature
* Gotthold Lessing
Laocoön
Nathan the Wise
* Freidrich Hölderlin
Hymns and Fragments
Selected Poems
* Heinrich von Kleist
Five Plays
Stories
