English literary canon
This is not so much a class, but a guide to the major works of the evolving literary canon. This canon is not modeled off of one particular literary canon, but based on a variety of opinions and canons that pick the major authors of the various English literary movements and their major works.
Comprehensive canon
The following is a list of canonical authors and canonical works. Names bolded represent highly significant authors or works.
Medieval
Drama
- The York Cycle
- Everyman
Poetry
- Beowulf
- Brunanburh
- Cædmon: Cædmon's Hymn
- Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde
- William Langland: Piers Plowman
- Cynewulf: The Ascension
- Deor
- Discourse of the Soul to its Body
- Dream of the Rood
- Pearl Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
- The Battle of Maldon
- The Seafarer
- The Wanderer
- Widsith
Prose
Renaissance
Drama
- Frances Beaumont and John Fletcher: Philaster
- Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday
- Robert Greene: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, James the Fourth
- John Lyly: Endimion
- Ben Jonson: The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair: A Comedy, Volpone, Every Man in His Humour
- Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
- Philip Massinger: A New Way to Pay Old Debts
- George Peele: The Old Wives' Tale
- William Shakespeare
- Nicholas Udall: Ralph Roister Doister
- John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Poetry
- John Donne
- George Hibert: The Temple
- William Shakespeare
- Edmund Spenser: The Fairie Queen
Prose
- Francis Bacon: New Atlantis
- Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Thomas Deloney: Jack of Newbury
- George Gascoigne: The Adventures of Master F. J.
- John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
- Thomas Malory: Morte D'Arthur
- Thomas More: Utopia
- Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller
- Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines
- Philip Sidney: Arcadia
English Civil War and Restoration
Drama
Poetry
- Thomas Carew: The Rapture
- John Cleveland: The Rebel Scot
- Abraham Cowley: The Mistress
- Richard Crashaw: 'Delights of the Muses
- John Denham: Cooper's Hill
- John Dryden
- Robert Herrick: Hesperides
- Andrew Marvell
- John Milton: Paradise Lost
- Francis Quarles: Emblems
- Thomas Traherne: The Wonder
- Henry Vaughan: Silex Scintillans
- Edmund Waller: The Bud, Go, lovely Rose, On a Girdle
Prose
- Richard Baxter: Saints' Everlasting Rest
- Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
- Thomas Browne
- John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress
- Thomas Fuller: The Worthies of England
- Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living, Holy Dying
- Thomas Urquhart
- Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler
Georgian
Drama
- Henry Fielding: The Modern Husband
- David Garrick and George Colman: The Clandestine Marriage';
- John Gay: The Beggar's Opera
- Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
- John O'Keeffe: Wild Oats
- Percy Shelley: The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound
Poetry
- William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem
- Robert Burns
- George Gordon Byron: Don Juan, Child Harold's Pilgrimage
- Samuel Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Cristabel
- William Collins
- William Cowper
- Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
- Leigh Hunt
- John Keats: Sleep and Poetry, Lamia, Hyperion, Odes, Fall of Hyperion
- Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes
- Charles Lamb
- Alexander Pope: Dunciad, Rape of the Lock
- Walter Scott
- Percy Bysshe Shelley: Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Ozymandius, Adonais
- Christopher Smart: A Song to David
- James Thomson
- William Wordsworth: The Prelude, "Lucy" poems, "Matthew" poems, Tintern Abbey
Prose
- Jane Austen
- Frances Burney: Evelina
- Jane Collier:
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
- Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
- Maria Edgeworth: Belinda
- Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
- Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quixote
- Matthew Lewis: The Monk
- Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling
- Ann Radcliffe
- Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa
- Walter Scott: Waverley
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
- Tobias Smollet: Humphrey Clinker
- Lawrence Sterne: Tristam Shandy, Sentimental Journey
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
- Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto
Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding
Victorian
Drama
- Gilbert and Sullivan
- George Bernard Shaw (continuing into 20th Century)
- Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Poetry
- Matthew Arnold
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Robert Browning
- Thomas Carlyle
- Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky, The Hunting of the Snark
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A. E. Housman: Shropshire Lad
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market
- Algernon Charles Swinburne
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses, Idylls of the King, In Memoriam A. H. H., The Lady of Shalott
- Joanne Slack " A man and his dog"
Prose
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret
- Charlotte Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- Lewis Carroll
- Wilkie Collins
- Charles Dickens
- Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil
- George Eliot: Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede
- Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton, North and South
- George Gissing: The Odd Women, New Grub Street
- Thomas Hardy
- O. Henry
- Washington Irving
- Henry James
- W. Somerset Maugham
- Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Israel Potter
- Margaret Oliphant: Miss Marjoribanks
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Bram Stoker: Dracula
- William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
- Mark Twain
- H. G. Wells
- Edith Wharton
- Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray'
- Ellen Wood: East Lynne
20th century
Drama
- Samuel Beckett
- J. M. Synge
- William Butler Yeats
Poetry
- W. H. Auden
- Rupert Brooke
- T. S. Eliot
- Seamus Heaney
- Dylan Thomas
- William Butler Yeats
Prose
- Saul Bellow
- Agatha Christie
- Joseph Conrad
- Felipe Fernadez-Armesto
- E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
- Aldous Huxley
- James Joyce: Dubliners, Ulysses
- Rudyard Kipling
- D. H. Lawrence
- C. S. Lewis
- George Orwell - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Virginia Woolf
Other canons
Developing novels
Novel development
Adventure novels
Historic novels
- Walter Scott: Waverley (1814)
- Walter Scott: Rob Roy (1817)
- Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1819)
- R. D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone (1869)
Gothic novels
- Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
- Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
- Matthew Lewis: The Monk (1796)
- Ann Radcliffe: The Italian (1796)
- Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
- Jonathan Chappell: Jane Slayer (2014)
Sensation novels
- Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1860)
- Ellen Wood: East Lynne (1861)
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
- Wilkie Collins: Armadale (1866)
- Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)
Sentimental novels
- Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling (1771)
Women's Literature
African American Literature
See also
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Resource type: this resource is a reading list. |
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