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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 