Humanities
Literature
Written art — the technology humans use to transmit interior experience across time.
12 fields · 112 topics · 13 curated works
Fields within Literature
Literary Theory & Criticism
11Frameworks for reading closely and arguing about it.
Close Reading · Formalism & New Criticism · Structuralism in Literature · Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction · Marxist Criticism
Poetry
10The most compressed use of language available.
Prosody & Metre · Rhyme & Sound · Imagery & Figurative Language · The Sonnet · Epic Poetry
The Novel
10The dominant literary form of the last three centuries.
Rise of the Novel · Realism · Naturalism · The Bildungsroman · Stream of Consciousness
Drama & Theatre Literature
9Text written to be performed.
Greek Tragedy · Greek Comedy · Shakespeare · Elizabethan & Jacobean Drama · Neoclassical Drama
Classical & Ancient Literature
9The texts everything later is in conversation with.
Homer · Greek Lyric & Tragedy · Virgil · Ovid · Roman Satire
Medieval & Early Modern Literature
9From Beowulf to the Enlightenment.
Old English Literature · Dante · Chaucer · Medieval Romance · Renaissance Poetry
Nineteenth-Century Literature
9The century of the great realist novel.
Romanticism · Victorian Literature · Russian Realism · Dostoevsky · Tolstoy
Modern & Contemporary Literature
10Twentieth century onward.
Literary Modernism · Joyce · Woolf · Kafka · The Lost Generation
World Literature
10Traditions outside the Anglo-European default.
African Literature · Latin American Literature · Arabic Literature · Persian Literature · Japanese Literature
Genre Fiction
8Popular forms, several of which do serious work.
Science Fiction · Fantasy · Crime & Detective Fiction · Horror · Historical Fiction
Non-Fiction & the Essay
8Prose that argues, explains or remembers.
The Essay Form · Memoir & Autobiography · Biography · Literary Journalism · Nature Writing
Writing Craft
9How the thing is actually made.
Prose Style · Story Structure · Character Construction · Dialogue · Revision & Editing
Reading in Literature
13Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
- BookThe Elements of StyleStrunk & White, 1959
Omit needless words. A short prescriptive manual worth knowing well enough to break deliberately.
- BookOn WritingStephen King, 2000
Half memoir, half craft manual: read constantly, write daily, cut ten percent, and distrust adverbs.
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
- BookThe OdysseyHomer, 700 BCE
The founding narrative of return and cunning in Western literature, and the origin of most of its structural furniture.
- BookAspects of the NovelE. M. Forster, 1927
Separates story from plot and flat characters from round ones — distinctions so useful they are now invisible.
- BookThe Left Hand of DarknessUrsula K. Le Guin, 1969
Builds a world without fixed gender to make the reader's assumptions visible — the case that genre fiction is a thought experiment.
- BookHow to Read a PoemTerry Eagleton, 2007
Argues criticism has stopped attending to form, and demonstrates close reading as a skill rather than a mood.
- BookHow Fiction WorksJames Wood, 2008
A working critic's account of free indirect style, detail and character — close reading demonstrated rather than described.
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
- EssayEssaysMichel de Montaigne, 1580
Invents the essay by using himself as the subject under investigation, and stays honest enough to keep contradicting himself.
- BookDon QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes, 1605
Generally taken as the first modern novel: a book about a man ruined by reading, which knows it is a book.
- BookMiddlemarchGeorge Eliot, 1871
A provincial town rendered with enough moral attention that ordinary compromise becomes as gripping as catastrophe.
- BookOne Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel García Márquez, 1967
A century of one family told as if myth and record were the same register, and the book that carried Latin American fiction worldwide.
- BookBelovedToni Morrison, 1987
Slavery written as haunting because its damage is not in the past tense, and narrated in fragments because that is how it is survivable.
- BookPoeticsAristotle, 335 BCE
The first systematic theory of narrative: plot over character, reversal and recognition, and the function of catharsis.