Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The “Western Canon”: Read Many of the Texts Free Online [feedly]

Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The "Western Canon": Read Many of the Texts Free Online
// Open Culture

I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the "Western Canon" as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—"all that's good, and great, and true" was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Bloom's reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called "Canon Wars," likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher Allan Bloom. That Bloom was himself no ideologue, writes Jim Sleeper; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and "an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life." Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values, The Closing of the American Mind, became a textbook of the neoconservative right.

Though Harold Bloom wished to distance himself from culture war polemics, he has unapologetically practiced what Allan Bloom preached, teaching the Canonical "great books" of literature and religion and opposing all manner of critics on the left, whom he lumps together in the phrase "the School of Resentment." Bloom's 1973 The Anxiety of Influence has itself exerted a major influence on literary studies, and best-selling popular works, like 1998's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have kept Harold Bloom's name in circulation even when scholarly citations of his work declined. In 1994, Bloom re-affirmed his commitment to the Canon with The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a fierce sortie against his so-called "School of Resentment" adversaries and a work University of Minnesota professor Norman Fruman called a "heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities." (Hear Bloom discuss the book with  Eleanor Wachtel in a 1995 CBC interview.)

The Western Canon is tightly focused on only 26 authors, but in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical. For all of Bloom's ornery defensiveness, his list is surprisingly inclusive, as well as—for Fruman—surprisingly idiosyncratic. (Bloom later disavowed the list, claiming that his editor insisted on it.) Like a classical philologist, Bloom divides his Canon into four "ages" or periods: The Theocratic Age (2000 BCE-1321 CE); The Aristocratic Age (1321-1832); The Democratic Age: 1832-1900); and The Chaotic Age (20th Century). You can view the complete list here. Below, we've compiled a very partial, but still sizable, excerpt of texts from Bloom's list that are available online through the University of Adelaide's ebook library. For all of the unpopular positions he has taken over the past few decades, Bloom's immense erudition, expansive intellect, and sincere commitment to the humanities have never been in question. As a distinguished exemplar of a fading tradition, he is an invaluable resource to students and lovers of literature.

A: "The Theocratic Age"

The Ancient Greeks

Homer (ca.800BC)

Iliad; Odyssey.

Hesiod (ca.700BC)

Works and Days; Theogony.

Sappho (ca.600BC)

Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC)

Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians; Suppliant Women.

Sophocles (c. 496-c. 405 BC)

Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra; Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes.

Euripides (480 or 484-406 BC)

Cyclops; Heracles; Alcestis; Hecuba; Bacchae; Orestes; Andromache; Medea; Ion; Hippolytus; Helen; Iphigenia at Aulis.

Aristophanes (ca. 446 BC – 385 BC)

The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen.

Herodotus, 485–420BCE

The Histories.

Thucydides, ca.460 BCE

The Peloponnesian Wars.

Plato, c.427-c.347 BCE

Dialogues.

Aristotle, 384–322 BCE

Poetics; Ethics.

Hellenistic Greeks

Menander, ca. 342–291 BC

The Girl from Samos.

Plutarch, 46–120

Lives; Moralia.

Aesop (620 – 560 BC)

Fables.

Petronius, c.27-66

The Romans

Terence, 195/185–159 BC

The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law.

Lucretius, 98?–55 BCE

The Way Things Are.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 BCE

On the Gods.

Horace, 65-8 BCE

Odes; Epistles; Satires.

Catullus (c.84 B.C. – c.54 B.C.)

Attis and Other Poems.

Virgil (70-19 BC)

Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics.

Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD)

Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca.4 BCE–65 CE

Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens.

Petronius, c.27-66

Satyricon.

Apuleius, c. 123/125-c. 180

The Golden Ass.

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

Augustine of Hippo, 354–430

City of God; Confessions.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220

Parzival.

Chrétien de Troyes, 12th cent

Yvain: The Knight of the Lion.

Beowulf (ca.800)

B: "The Aristocratic Age"

Italy

Dante (1265 – 1321)

The Divine Comedy; The New Life.

Petrarch, 1304-1374

Lyric Poems; Selections.

Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375

The Decameron.

Matteo Maria Boiardo, 1440 or 41-1494.

Orlando Innamorato.

Lodovico Ariosto, 1474-1533

Orlando Furioso.

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527

The Prince; The Mandrake, a Comedy.

Benvenuto Cellini, 1500–1571

Autobiography.

Tommaso Campanella, 1568-1639

Poems; The City of the Sun.

Spain

Miguel de Cervantes, 1547-1616

Don Quixote; Exemplary Stories.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, 1600–1681

Life is a Dream; The Mayor of Zalamea; The Mighty Magician; The Doctor of His Own Honor.

England and Scotland

Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca.1343-1400)

The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Malory, 1430-1471

Le Morte D'Arthur.

Thomas More, 1478-1535

Utopia.

Philip Sidney, 1554-1586.

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry.

Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599

The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems.

Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593

Poems and Plays.

Thomas Nashe, 1567-1601

The Unfortunate Traveller.

William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

Plays and Poems.

John Donne, 1572-1631

Poems; Sermons.

Ben Jonson, 1573-1637

Poems, Plays, and Masques.

Francis Bacon, 1561–1626

Essays.

Robert Burton, 1577–1640

The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Thomas Browne, 1605–1682

Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus.

Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679

Leviathan.

Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674

Poems.

Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678

Poems.

John Ford, 1586-ca.1640

'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

John Webster, c.1580-c.1634

The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi.

Izaak Walton, 1593-1683

The Compleat Angler.

John Milton, 1608-1674

Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica.

John Aubrey, 1626–1697

Brief Lives.

Samuel Butler, 1612-1680

Hudibras.

John Dryden, 1631-1700

Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays.

Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745

A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver's Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems.

Alexander Pope, 1688-1744

Poems.

John Gay, 1685-1732

The Beggar's Opera.

James Boswell, 1740-1795

Life of Johnson; Journals.

Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784

Works.

Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Edmund Burke, 1729–1797

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France

Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774

The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751–1816

The School of Scandal; The Rivals.

William Cowper, 1731-1800

Poetical Works.

Defoe, Daniel (1661?-1731)

Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year.

Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761.

Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison.

Henry Fielding, 1707-1754

Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.

Tobias Smollett, 1721-1771

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random.

Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.

Fanny Burney, 1752-1840

Evelina.

France

Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592

Essays.

Francois Rabelais, 1494?-1553?

Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1549

The Heptameron.

Jean de La Fontaine, 1621-1695

Fables.

Molière, 1622-1673

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, 1623–1662

Pensées.

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 1712–1778

The Confessions; Émile; La Nouvelle Héloïse.

Voltaire, 1694-1778

Zadig; Candide; Letters on England; The Lisbon Earthquake.

Germany

Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1466–1536

In Praise of Folly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832

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, 1759-1805

The Robbers; Mary Stuart; Wallenstein; Don Carlos; On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature.

C: "The Democratic Age"

Italy

Giovanni Verga, 1840-1922

Little Novels of Sicily; Mastro-Don Gesualdo; The House by the Medlar Tree; The She-Wolf and Other Stories.

France

Victor Hugo, 1802-1885

The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems; Les Misérables; Notre-Dame of Paris; William Shakespeare; The Toilers of the Sea; The End of Satan; God.

Gautier, Théophile, 1811–1872

Mademoiselle de Maupin; Enamels and Cameos.

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850

The Girl with the Golden Eyes; Louis Lambert; The Wild Ass's Skin; Old Goriot; Cousin Bette; A Harlot High and Low; Eugénie Grandet; Ursule Mirouet.

Stendhal, 1783-1842

On Love; The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma.

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880

Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education; Salammbô; A Simple Soul.

George Sand, 1804-1876

The Haunted Pool.

Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867

Flowers of Evil; Paris Spleen.

Guy de Maupassant, 1850-1893

Selected Short Stories.

Emile Zola, 1840-1902

Germinal; L'Assommoir; Nana.

Scandinavia

Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1906

Brand; Peer Gynt; Emperor and Galilean; Hedda Gabler; The Master Builder; The Lady from the Sea; When We Dead Awaken.

Great Britain

William Blake, 1757-1827

Complete Poetry and Prose.

William Wordsworth, 1770–1850

Poems; The Prelude.

Walter Scott, 1771-1832

Waverley; The Heart of Midlothian; Redgauntlet; Old Mortality.

Jane Austen, 1775-1817

Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Mansfield Park; Persuasion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772–1834

Poems and Prose.

Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830

Essays and Criticism.

George Byron, 1788-1824

Don Juan; P oems.

Thomas de Quincey, 1785–1859

Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Selected Prose.

Maria Edgeworth, 1767-1849

Castle Rackrent.

Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810-1865

Cranford; Mary Barton; North and South.

Charles Robert Maturin, 1782–1824

Melmoth the Wanderer.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Poems; A Defence of Poetry.

Mary Shelley, 1797-1851

Frankenstein.

John Keats, 1795-1821

Poems and Letters.

Robert Browning, 1812–1889

Poems; The Ring and the Book.

Charles Dickens, 1812-1870

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; David Copperfield; The Adventures of Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Bleak House; Hard Times; Nicholas Nickleby; Dombey and Son; Great Expectations; Martin Chuzzlewit; Christmas Stories; Little Dorrit; Our Mutual Friend; The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892

Poems.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882

Poems and Translations.

Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888

Poems; Essays.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1830-1894.

Poems.

Thomas Love Peacock, 1785–1866

Nightmare Abbey; Gryll Grange.

Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1881

Selected Prose; Sartor Resartus.

John Ruskin, 1819-1900

Modern Painters; The Stones of Venice; Unto This Last; The Queen of the Air.

John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873

On Liberty; Autobiography.

Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882

The Barsetshire Novels; The Palliser Novels; Orley Farm; The Way We Live Now.

Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898

Complete Works.

George Gissing, 1857-1903

New Grub Street.

Charlotte Bronte, 1816-1855

Jane Eyre; Villette.

Emily Bronte, 1818-1848

Poems; Wuthering Heights.

Anne Bronte, 1820-1849

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863

Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond.

George Meredith, 1828-1909

Poems; The Egoist.

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936

Collected Poems; The Man Who Was Thursday.

Samuel Butler, 1835-1902

Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh.

Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889

The Moonstone; The Woman in White; No Name.

Thomson, James, 1834–1882

The City of the Dreadful Night.

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

Plays; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Artist as Critic; Letters.

George Eliot, 1819-1880

Adam Bede; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

Essays; Kidnapped; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island; The New Arabian Nights; The Master of Ballantrae; Weir of Hermiston.

William Morris, 1834-1896

Early Romances; Poems; The Earthly Paradise; The Well at the World's End; News from Nowhere.

Bram Stoker, 1847-1912

Dracula.

George MacDonald, 1824-1905

Lilith; At the Back of the North Wind.

Germany

Jakob Grimm, 1785–1863 and Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786–1859

Fairy Tales.

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus), 1776-1822

The Devil's Elixir; Tales.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900

The Birth of Tragedy; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power.

Russia

Aleksandr Pushkin, 1799-1837

Complete Prose Tales; Complete Poetry; Eugene Onegin; Narrative Poems; Boris Godunov.

Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852

The Complete Tales; Dead Souls; The Government Inspector.

Mikhail Lermontov, 1814-1841

Narrative Poems; A Hero of Our Time.

Ivan Turgenev, 1818-1883

A Sportsman's Notebook; A Month in the Country; Fathers and Sons; On the Eve; First Love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821-1881

Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed (The Devils); The Brothers Karamazov; Short Novels.

Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910

The Cossacks; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; A Confession; The Power of Darkness; Short Novels.

Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904

The Tales; The Major Plays.

The United States

Washington Irving, 1783-1859

The Sketch Book.

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851.

The Deerslayers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882

Nature; Essays; Representative Men; The Conduct of Life; Journals; Poems.

Emily Dickinson, 1830–1886

Complete Poems.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864

The Scarlet Letter; Tales and Sketches; The Marble Faun; Notebooks.

Herman Melville, 1819-1891

Moby-Dick; The Piazza Tales; Billy Budd; Collected Poems; Clarel.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849

Poetry and Tales; Essays and Reviews; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Eureka.

Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862

Walden; Poems; Essays.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807–1882

Selected Poems.

Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1913

Collected Writings.

Louisa May Alcott, 1832–1888

Little Women.

Kate Chopin, 1850-1904

The Awakening.

William Dean Howells, 1837-1920

The Rise of Silas Lapham; A Modern Instance.

Henry James, 1843-1916

The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; The Princess Casamassima; The Awkward Age; Short Novels and Tales; The Ambassadors; The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl

Mark Twain, 1835-1910

Complete Short Stories; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Devil's Racetrack; Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger; Pudd'nhead Wilson; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

William James, 1842–1910

The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism.

D: "The Chaotic Age"

France

Anatole France, 1844-1924

Penguin Island; Thaïs.

Marcel Proust, 1871-1922

Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time).

Albert Camus, 1913-1960

The Stranger; The Plague; The Fall; The Rebel.

Great Britain and Ireland.

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939

The Collected Poems; Collected Plays; A Vision; Mythologies.

George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950

Major Critical Essays; Heartbreak House; Pygmalion; Saint Joan; Major Barbara; Back to Methuselah.

John Millington Synge, 1871-1909

Collected Plays.

George Douglas Brown, 1869-1902

The House with the Green Shutters.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928

The Well-Beloved; The Woodlanders; The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure; Collected Poems.

Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936

Kim; Collected Stories; Puck of Pook's Hill; Complete Verse.

Housman, A. E., 1859-1936

Collected Poems.

Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924

Lord Jim; The Secret Agent; Nostromo; Under Western Eyes; Victory.

Ronald Firbank, 1886-1926

Five Novels.

Ford Madox Ford, 1873-1939

Parade's End; The Good Soldier.

Saki, 1870-1916

The Short Stories.

Wells, H. G., 1866-1946

The Science Fiction Novels.

David Lindsay, 1876-1945

A Voyage to Arcturus.

Arnold Bennett, 1867–1931.

The Old Wives' Tale.

John Galsworthy, 1867-1933

The Forsyth Saga.

Lawrence, D. H., 1885-1930

Complete Poems; Studies in Classic American Literature; Complete Short Stories; Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love.

Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941

Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando: A Biography; The Waves; Between the Acts.

James Joyce, 1882-1941

Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegans Wake.

George Orwell, 1903-1950

Collected Essays; 1984.

Germany.

Franz Kafka, 1883–1924

Amerika; The Complete Stories; The Blue Octavo Notebook; The Trial; Diaries; The Castle; Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms.

Russia.

Maksim Gorky, 1868-1936

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev; Autobiography.

Scandinavia.

Knut Hamsun, 1859-1952

Hunger; Pan.

Czech.

Karel Čapek, 1890-1938

War with the Newts; R.U.R.

Australia and New Zealand.

Miles Franklin, 1879-1954

My Brilliant Career.

Katherine Mansfield, 1888-1923

The Short Stories.

The United States.

Edith Wharton, 1862–1937

Collected Short Stories; The Age of Innocence; Ethan Frome; The House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country.

Willa Cather, 1873-1947

My Antonia; The Professor's House; A Lost Lady.

Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946

Three Lives; The Geographical History of America; The Making of Americans; Tender Buttons.

Theodore Dreiser, 1871-1945

Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy.

Sinclair Lewis, 1885-1951

Babbitt; It Can't Happen Here.

Eugene O'Neill, 1888-1953

Lazarus Laughed; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's Journey into Night.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1896-1940

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night.

Nathanael West, 1903-1940

Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.

Of this last Appendix–which ends with Tony Kushner's Angels in America and includes a great degree of diversity–Bloom writes: "I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug's game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical . . . literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind." Again, the selections above are very limited. Before you ask, "what about x, y, or z!" see Bloom's full list here. And if you still do not find authors you believe deserve inclusion in any version of the Western Canon, pick up a copy of Bloom's book to learn more about his critical criteria.

A decent number of the texts above can also be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

Related Content:

Harold Bloom Recites 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon' by Wallace Stevens

Harold Bloom on the Ghastly Decline of the Humanities (and on Obama's Poetry)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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