Humanities
Written art — the technology humans use to transmit interior experience across time.
12 fields · 124 topics · 161 curated works
Frameworks for reading closely and arguing about it.
Foundations & Overviews · Close Reading · Formalism & New Criticism · Structuralism in Literature · Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction
The most compressed use of language available.
Foundations & Overviews · Prosody & Metre · Rhyme & Sound · Imagery & Figurative Language · The Sonnet
The dominant literary form of the last three centuries.
Foundations & Overviews · Rise of the Novel · Realism · Naturalism · The Bildungsroman
Text written to be performed — Greek tragedy through Shakespeare to the absurd, where the page is only half the work.
Foundations & Overviews · Greek Tragedy · Greek Comedy · Shakespeare · Elizabethan & Jacobean Drama
The texts everything later is in conversation with.
Foundations & Overviews · Homer · Greek Lyric & Tragedy · Virgil · Ovid
From Beowulf to the Enlightenment — Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes and Milton, and the vernaculars that displaced Latin.
Foundations & Overviews · Old English Literature · Dante · Chaucer · Medieval Romance
The century of the great realist novel — Romanticism, the Victorians, and the Russian and French realists who set the terms.
Foundations & Overviews · Romanticism · Victorian Literature · Russian Realism · Dostoevsky
Twentieth century onward — modernism and its difficulty, then magical realism and the postcolonial writers who answered it.
Foundations & Overviews · Literary Modernism · Joyce · Woolf · Kafka
Traditions outside the Anglo-European default.
Foundations & Overviews · African Literature · Latin American Literature · Arabic Literature · Persian Literature
Popular forms, several of which do serious work.
Foundations & Overviews · Science Fiction · Fantasy · Crime & Detective Fiction · Horror
Prose that argues, explains or remembers — the essay, memoir, biography, literary journalism and the long-form argument.
Foundations & Overviews · The Essay Form · Memoir & Autobiography · Biography · Literary Journalism
How the thing is actually made — structure, character, dialogue and voice, and the revision where most of the work happens.
Foundations & Overviews · Prose Style · Story Structure · Character Construction · Dialogue
No prior grounding assumed.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Sin-leqi-unninni · 1200 BCE
A king's grief at losing his one friend to death, and his failed quest for immortality, make the case that fame in the memory of the living is the…
+46 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Odyssey
Homer · 700 BCE
The founding narrative of return and cunning in Western literature, and the origin of most of its structural furniture.
+68 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Essays
Michel de Montaigne · 1580
Invents the essay by using himself as the subject under investigation, and stays honest enough to keep contradicting himself.
+44 more at this level
12 of 161 works
Sin-leqi-unninni
A king's grief at losing his one friend to death, and his failed quest for immortality, make the case that fame in the memory of the living is the only immortality actually available.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Euripides
A foreign sorceress abandoned by her Greek husband for a more advantageous marriage takes a calculated revenge that includes killing their own children, staged to argue that a city's contempt for an outsider produces exactly the monstrousness it claims to fear.
about 85 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Sophocles
A king's relentless investigation into a murder turns out to be an investigation into himself, arguing that self-knowledge can arrive only through a fall no foresight could have prevented.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Aristophanes
Stages a sex strike organised across warring Greek city-states to argue, through farce, that the women shut out of politics have both the standing and the leverage to end a war the men cannot stop themselves fighting.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Aristophanes
The god Dionysus descends to the underworld to bring a great tragedian back from the dead to save Athens, and stages a formal contest between Aeschylus and Euripides to argue that tragedy's civic duty is to make citizens better, not merely to be clever.
about 55 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ovid
Seduction is a teachable technique with rules, not fate or divine favour, and the poem sets out to instruct Roman men and women in it as systematically as any manual of rhetoric.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Unknown
A hero's three fights, against a monster, its mother, and finally a dragon in old age, are arranged to argue that even the greatest strength cannot be separated from mortality.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Fujiwara no Teika (compiler)
Anthologises one hundred classical Japanese waka by one hundred poets into a single sequence, fixing the courtly canon of Japanese lyric poetry and later becoming the deck for the karuta card game.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Unknown
A knight who accepts an impossible bargain discovers that chivalric perfection is a performance under pressure, and that surviving with a single flaw intact is the realistic outcome, not total honour or total failure.
about 90 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026William Shakespeare
154 sonnets that push the English three-quatrain-and-couplet form toward sustained argument and a volta-driven turn, addressed to a young man and a 'dark lady' whose identities the poems never resolve.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Molière
A pious fraud who talks his way into a household's trust and near-destruction, staged to argue that hypocrisy dressed as devotion is more dangerous than open vice — a case so pointed the play was banned for five years.
about 75 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Defoe
A shipwrecked man's meticulous diary of self-sufficient survival treats circumstantial detail as proof of truth, establishing the realist illusion later novelists would depend on.
about 8 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026