Literature

The Golden Bough (1890) by James George Frazer discusses fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, and the scapegoat.
The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1895) by Georges Polti.
Anatomy of Criticism (1957) by Northrop Frye.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1972) by Joseph Campbell on the monomyth of the hero’s journey from a call to adventure.

Folklore studies and morphology:

• Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1958)
• Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (2004) of story types.

Nonlinear narrative: the storytelling order (syuzhet) differs from the actual chronological order of events (fabula).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AQA_Anthology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World#See_also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Library%27s_100_Best_Novels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Radical_Thinkers_releases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde%27s_100_Books_of_the_Century
Book of the Month club.
national book award
Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence (1973)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Western_Canon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Award
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)

200 BC. Panchatantra: Sanskrit animal fables.
200 BC. Arthashastra (“Economics”)
The Voyage of Bran (c. 700) features the Celtic Otherworld and the Silver Branch.
1000. Beowulf is written in Old English.
1100. Kathasaritsagara: Sanksrit legends.
1170. Marie de France writes Breton lai or narrative lay, short love poems with Celtic influence.
Divine Comedy (1321) by Dante Alighieri.
The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio, a collection of short stories.
The Canterbury Tales (1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) by Mirandola emhasizes charity, intelligence, and justice, in that order.
A grimoire is a spellbook. Key of Solomon (1400), Malleus Maleficarum (1486), De occulta philosophia (1509), Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), Daemonologie (1597) by King James I.

Elizabethan era

English Renaissance.

Shakespeare

• Hamlet (1600). A tragedy of hesitation and indecision.
  • Act 3 opens with an artistic soliloquy on living: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
  • Though this be madness, yet there is method in it
• Othello (1603). Suspicion of his innocent wife.
• Macbeth (1606). Ambition and guilt. Spurred by three witches, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stab King Duncan. Macbeth murders Duncan’s guards. Duncan’s sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee. Macbeth murders Banquo but Banquo’s son Fleance escapes. At a banquet, Banquo’s ghost enters and sits in Macbeth’s place, and Macbeth raves at the seemingly empty chair, surprising the nobles. The witches tell Macbeth to beware Macduff, that no one born of a woman will be able to harm him, and he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Macduff flees, and Macbeth kills Lady Macduff and her young son. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, washing her hands over and over again. Duncan’s son raises an army in England, disguised by carrying tree branches. Macbeth delivers his “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy. Macduff says that he is from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d and beheads Macbeth.
• Romeo and Juliet (1597)
• Henry V (1599). Henry delivers the St Crispin’s Day Speech on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.
• Antony and Cleopatra (1607). Deep female hero.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) involves fantasy fairies and a blurring of identity in love
• Much Ado About Nothing (1598)
• Julius Caesar (1599)
• King Lear (1606), danger of flattery, very dark.
  • “son of a bitch”
• Twelfth Night (1601), a Christmas romantic comedy.
  • “this is very midsummer madness”
• The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) comedy: “this is the short and the long of it”
• The Tempest (1610). Betrayal, revenge, and family.
• Richard III: John of Gaunt’s dying speech includes “this sceptered isle… this precious stone set in the silver sea”
• All’s Well That Ends Well (1608).
• “All that glitters is not gold.” from The Merchant of Venice
• G. Wilson Knight writes The Wheel of Fire (1930) interpreting Shakespeare

Michel de Montaigne popularizes the essay as a literary genre in his Essays (1580).

Don Quixote (1615) by Miguel de Cervantes.

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) celebrates the Queen.

• “roses red, and violets blue”

John Donne is a metaphysical poet emphasizing extended metaphors (conceits). The Flea (1590) compares a flea to sex. The Canonization (1633) compares lovers to saints. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (1611) compares separated lovers to the legs of a compass.

Puritan preacher John Bunyan writes The Pilgrim’s Progress (1978), an allegorical novel.

John Dryden is England’s first poet laureate, writing tragedies like comedies like Marriage à la mode (1673) and satirical poems like Absalom and Achitophel (1681).

• “We first make our habits, then our habits make us”
• “There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know”
• “Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow / He who would search for pearls, must dive below.”
• “Great wits are to madness near allied / And thin partitions do their bounds divide”
• “Better shun the bait, than struggle in the snare”
• “Secret guilt is by silence revealed”
• “Love is love’s reward”
• “There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know”

Enlightenment era, 1650 - 1800

Liberalism and socialism. Upperclass men would embark on a Grand Tour, often to Italy.

• The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay is a satirical Augustan drama.
• Encyclopédie (1751) by Denis Diderot.
• Samuel Johnson writes A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
• Robinson Crusoe (1719) is possibly the first novel, about being stranded on an island.
• Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) is a proto-Romantic movement in Germany, including The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
• Victor Hugo writes The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Miserables (1862).
• Alexandre Dumas writes The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) and The Three Musketeers (1844).
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729).
  • “sweetness and light”
• 1915 P. G. Wodehouse writes British humor, including inept gentleman Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves.
• Benjamin Franklin: Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732)
• Walter Scott writes Ivanhoe (1819) and the Waverley novels in medieval setting.
• Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville: captain Ahab’s quest for vengeance. Opening sentence “Call me Ishmael”.
• “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) by Herman Melville.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias (1818) sonnet.
  • Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
• Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton explores the fall of man. Milton campaigns against Charles I as a republican.
• Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott.
• American romanticism and transcendental poetry
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature (1836), Self-Reliance (1841), The Poet (1843).
  • Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1849).
  • Emily Dickinson writes confessional, feminist poetry with unconventional syntax.
  • Mark Twain writes Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
  • Henry James writes The Portrait of a Lady (1880).
  • Walt Whitman writes Leaves of Grass (1855)
  • Robert Frost writes New Hampshire (1923), including Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and Fire and Ice.
• Alexander Pope: “damn with faint praise”
  • An Essay on Criticism (1711)
    • To err is human; to forgive, divine.
    • A little learning is a dangerous thing.
• Faust (1832) by von Goethe. Written as a closet drama, a play intended to be read.
• Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. Van Helsing is a vampire slayer.
• The New Colossus (1883) by Emma Lazarus is a Petrarchan sonnet which is mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It compares the statue with the Greek Colossus of Rhodes and recasts it as a welcome for immigrants. Lazarus advocated for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Russia.
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton coins “the pen is mightier than the sword”, “the great unwashed”, and popularizes “It was a dark and stormy night”.

Political philosophy

• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1651), social contract theory, people are naturally bad
• John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689): concept of tabula rasa (blank slate)
• Rousseau: people are naturally good, but society corrupts. Discourse on Inequality (1755), The Social Contract (1762). Emile (1762) discusses how an individual can survive in a corrupt society. Confessions (1770) is an early autobiography.
• Voltaire writes for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Candide (1759).
• Cesare Beccaria: On Crimes and Punishments (1764), father of criminal justice, against the death penalty
• Montesquieu writes The Spirit of the Laws (1748)

Victorian Romanticism (1837–1901)

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962) by Stephen Greenblatt.
• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
• William Blake writes Jerusalem (1820) and Poetical Sketches (1777).
• Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816).
• Charles Dickens writes A Christmas Carol (1843), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861).
• George Eliot writes Middlemarch (1872) set in the countryside
• Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë.
• Wuthering Heights (1848) by Emily Brontë.
• Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is a drawing room play or comedy of manners.
• Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) on love, honour and betrayal. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).
• Vanity Fair (1848) by William Thackeray follows Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
• Kalevala (1835) compiles Finnish mythological poems. The Brothers Seven (1870) by Aleksis Kivi is the first Finnish novel. The Tales of Ensign Stål (1848) by Johan Ludvig Runeberg describes the Finnish War of 1808.
• The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley. She has a nightmare after Lord Byron suggests writing a ghost story.
• The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
• Lord Byron: Don Juan (1824) ridicules contemporary rivals.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth write Lyrical Ballads (1798). Coleridge also writes the Biographia Literaria (1817) discusses the philosophy of poetry, while Wordsworth writes The Prelude (1850)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854).
  • Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.
  • The sward was trim as any garden lawn. Sward (“skin”) is turf or grassy surface.
• John Keats writes Ode to a Nightingale (1819).
• Robert Browning writes The Ring and the Book (1868) is a poem with dramatic monologues, irony, and social commentary.
• Treasure Island (1883) pioneers the pirate story. Long John Silver is a one-legged buccaneer with a parrot on his shoulder. Deserted tropical islands, treasure maps marked with an “X”, “shiver me timbers” to express surprise, “a sheet in the wind” or drunk.
• H. G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).
• Jules Verne. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).
• A well-made play emphasizes tight plotting over characterisation and intellectual ideas.
• Edwardian
  • E. M. Forster: Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1928) and A Room with a View (1908)

Realism.

• Leo Tolstoy writes War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878), and The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886).
• Alexander Pushkin writes Eugene Onegin (1832) discusses love and ennui.
• Honoré de Balzac writes La Comédie humaine (1848), a modern novel.
• Émile Zola writes a cycle of naturalist novels including Germinal (1884).
• Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky writes Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and The Idiot (1868).

Modernism

• Charles Baudelaire writes Les Fleurs du mal (1867), poems against modernity
• Virginia Woolf: modernist pioneer of stream of consciousness. Mrs Dalloway (1925).
• James Joyce: Finnegans Wake (1939).
  • Ulysses (1920): RTE recording with commentary
  • Dubliners (1914) includes The Dead.
• W. B. Yeats writes The Tower (1928)
• T. S. Eliot writes The Waste Land (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925).
• The Cantos (1962) by Ezra Pound develops modernism and imagism, with precise imagery and sharp language.
• August Strindberg: The Red Room (1879).
• Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957), Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979).
• John Sutherland Black writes the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1899)
• Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad.
• William Carlos Williams
• D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Women in Love (1920).
• Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time (1927).
• William Faulkner writes The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).
• Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
• Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.
• Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell.
• Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck.
• Oxford English Dictionary (1928).
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982) about life in the Prague Spring.
• George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion (1913), Saint Joan (1923), Heartbreak House (1919).
• Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978).
• Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali (1910). 1913 Nobel prize.
• Plays
  • 1879. Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House is one of the most performed.
  • 1899. Anton Chekhov: The Lady with the Dog.
  • 1941. Eugene O’Neill, 1936 Nobel Prize. Long Day’s Journey into Night.
  • 1947. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.
  • 1949. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.
• Richard Wright: Native Son (1940).
• James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955).
• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1958) and An Image of Africa (1975).
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. 1993 Nobel Prize. Pulitzer Prize.
• Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
• Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar (1963).
• Burger’s Daughter (1979) by Nadine Gordimer. 1991 Nobel Prize.
• Your Silence Will Not Protect You (2017) by Audre Lorde.
  • “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey.
• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Caribbean writer Jean Rhys.
• Edith Wharton: American novelist exploring the social and moral constraints of the upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including “The Age of Innocence.”
• Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005). Nobel Prize 2017.
• Flowers for Algernon (1966) by Daniel Keyes.
• Howl (1955) by Allen Ginsberg leads the beat generation.
• A Mathematician’s Apology (1940) by G. H. Hardy, an ode to pure math.
• Yasunari Kawabata: The Master of Go (1951) and Snow Country (1937). 1968 Nobel Prize.

Middle-earth includes the Lord of the Rings (1949) and The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien.

• “Not all those who wander are lost”
• “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Gandalf.
• “Courage is found in unlikely places.”
• “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence_on_Tolkien

Postmodernism

• David Foster Wallace
  • This is Water (2005): “exercise some control over how and what you think. Choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. Attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day”.
  • Infinite Jest (1996)
• Samuel Beckett: Irish playwright, absurdist Waiting for Godot (1953).
• Gao Xingjian: The Bus Stop (1981). 2000 Nobel Prize.
• Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Against the Day (2003).
• Vladimir Nabokov
  • Lolita (1955): Dolores “Lolita” Haze and Humbert Humbert. Lolita escapes with playwright Clare Quilty.
  • Pale Fire (1962)
• Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller.
• Kurt Vonnegut writes Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Cat’s Cradle.
• Jorge Luis Borges writes surreal short stories.
• Jacques Derrida develops deconstruction.
• Michel Foucault writes Discipline and Punish (1975) on power and knowledge, and The History of Sexuality (1986).
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) by Paulo Freire.
  • Banking model of education: learning is creative, not one-sided.
• Situated learning by Lave and Wenger: community of practice and co-construction of knowledge embedded in a specific context.
• Kenzaburō Ōe: The Silent Cry (1967). 1994 Nobel Prize.
• Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962). 2007 Nobel Prize.
• 1984 (1949) by George Orwell introduces newspeak, doublespeak, thoughtcrime.
• It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Arrowsmith (1925) by Sinclair Lewis
• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood.
• John Cheever: The Enormous Radio (1947). Short story.
• Alice Munro: The Love of a Good Woman (1998) short stories. Nobel Prize 2013.
• Robert Lowell: Life Studies (1959) poems. Pulitzer Prize.
• Louise Glück: The Wild Iris (1992) poems. 2020 Nobel Prize. Pulitzer Prize.
• Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) poem by Claudia Rankine on the black experience.
• Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America (1967)
• The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.
• A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
• Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
• Jean Baudrillard writes Simulacra and Simulation (1981), including hyperreality. Nonfiction.
• 2016. Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi. National Book Award for Nonfiction.
• Mo Yan: Red Sorghum (1986). 2012 Nobel Prize.
• Haruki Murakami: desire, power, alienation, magic. 1Q84 (2010), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995)
• Dilbert (1989) satirizes office culture.
• Bowling Alone (2000) by Robert D. Putnam on the decline of social capital and third places.
• Hunter S. Thompson writes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) about the failure of the counterculture movement.
• The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen.
• 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño.
• Wolf Hall (2009) by Hilary Mantel. Fictionalised biography of Thomas Cromwell.
• Elena Ferrante: My Brilliant Friend (2011) explores a friendship between the diligent Elena and the wilder Lila.
• The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead, alternate history. Pulitzer Prize.
• Pachinko (2017) by Min Jin Lee.

Columns

• The Straight Dope (1973) by Cecil Adams.
• Now I Know (2010) by Dan Lewis.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webby_Awards

Children’s

• Aesop’s Fables (600 BC) covered in the Perry Index.
  • The Fox and the Grapes
• One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, 14th century.
  • Sinbad the Sailor
• Tales of Mother Goose (1697).
• Brothers Grimm (1812):
  • Cinderella
  • The Frog Prince
  • Hansel and Gretel
  • Little Red Riding Hood
  • Rapunzel
  • Rumpelstiltskin
  • Sleeping Beauty
  • Snow White
• Hans Christian Andersen writes fairy tales: The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837), The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match Girl, The Princess and the Pea. “Once upon a time”.
• Russian Fairy Tales (1863)
  • Baba Yaga lives in a hut on chicken legs.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) by Lewis Carroll.
• Jack and the Beanstalk: Fee-fi-fo-fum.
• Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book (1894) with Mowgli, Baloo the bear, and Shere Khan the tiger. Also If— (1895) poem on stoicism, and the colonial The White Man’s Burden (1899). 1907 Nobel Prize.
• Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by A. A. Milne. Also Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Owl, Rabbit.
• Peter Pan (1902): the Lost Boys in Neverland, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook.
• The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Burnett.
• The Velveteen Rabbit (1921).
• Dr. Seuss: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), Horton Hears a Who! (1955), The Cat in the Hat (1957), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (1960), The Lorax (1971), Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990).
• Popeye the Sailor (1929).
• Curious George (1941).
• Pippi Longstocking (1945).
• The Chronicles of Narnia (1950) by C. S. Lewis.
• E. B. White: Charlotte’s Web (1952) about death. Stuart Little (1945).
• Paddington Bear (1958) wears a blue duffel coat and red hat, and carries a suitcase of marmalade sandwiches. He moves from Darkest Peru to London and joins the Brown family.
• Where the Wild Things Are (1963) by Maurice Sendak.
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969).
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988) by Roald Dahl.
• Watership Down (1972).
• Tuck Everlasting (1975) sad. Man in the yellow suit.
• Bridge to Terabithia (1977) sad. Leslie Burke helps Jesse Aarons learn courage.
• Redwall (1986).
• Brambly Hedge (1980).
• Peter Rabbit (1902) by Beatrix Potter.
• The Phantom Tollbooth (1961).
• Toad and Frog (1970).
• The Adventures of Tintin (1929) by Hergé.
• Eyewitness Books (1988)
• Scholastic: I Spy (1992), Goosebumps (1992), Captain Underpants (1997), Animorphs (2001)
• His Dark Materials (1995) by Philip Pullman.
• Holes (1998) by Louis Sachar.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999) by Lemony Snicket. Orphaned siblings Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, murderous Count Olaf.
• Artemis Fowl (2001) by Eoin Colfer.
• Alex Rider (2000) spy novels.
• Maximum Ride (2005) by James Patterson featuring winged bird-humans.
• Eragon (2002).
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians (2005) by Rick Riordan.

Genre

Science Fiction

• H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898).

• Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951), “I, Robot” (1950)

• 1960. New Wave: literary, modernist, experimental scifi.

• Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Starship Troopers (1959).

  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966): lunar colony culture, kinetic bombardment, conscious AI.

• Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

• Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert.

• Ursula K. Le Guin: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973), Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974).

• Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953), Rendezvous with Rama (1973), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The City and the Stars (1956)

• Larry Niven: The Mote in God’s Eye (1974) and Ringworld (1970).

• Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer (1980)

• Cyberpunk explores drug culture and the sexual revolution.

  • William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984).

• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985).

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1989)

• Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton (2004).

• Ted Chiang: Story of Your Life (2016)

• A Wrinkle in Time (1962) by Madeleine L’Engle.

• Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard pioneers sword and sorcery.

• Agatha Christie writes And Then There Were None (1939).

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) by Douglas Adams.

• Harry Potter (2007) by J. K. Rowling

  • Philosopher’s Stone
  • Chamber of Secrets
  • Prisoner of Azkaban
  • Goblet of Fire

• Discworld: Small Gods (1992), Men at Arms (1993) by Terry Pratchett

• Neil Gaiman: Good Omens (1990) and American Gods (2001)

• Vernor Vinge: A Deepness in the Sky (1999).

• Children of Time (2016) by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

• Cixin Liu writes the The Dark Forest (2008), part of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.

Horror and Gothic fiction.

• Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). Also coins “the almighty dollar”.
• The King in Yellow (1895) by Robert W. Chambers
• Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven (1845), The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Cask of Amontillado (1846), The Gold-Bug (1843)
• The Monkey’s Paw (1902).
• Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu (1928), The Colour Out of Space (1927).
  • The Nameless City (1921) includes the Necronomicon and the city of Arkham in Massachusetts.
  • “That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die.”
• Stephen King: Carrie (1974), Danse Macabre (1981), On Writing (2000), The Stand (1978).

Mystery

• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37562080-beware-the-past
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55457493-the-man-who-died-twice

Guinness World Records

Jokes

• Knock-knock joke
• Shaggy dog
• Pun

Figures of speech

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_narrative_techniques#Style
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Poetic_devices

Poetry

• Narrative poetry: epic and verse drama.
• Lyric poetry expresses feelings
• Meter or prosody is the rhythmic structure.
  • The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit. An iamb is unstressed then stressed.
  • Scansion marks the metrical pattern. Stressed macron – and unstressed breve ◡.
  • Catalexis is a metrically incomplete line of verse. A headless line omits the unstressed syllable at the start.
  • Anacrusis (“pushing up”) are an extrametrical prelude to the verse. Known as a pickup in music.
• Fixed verse follows a form, while free verse is unconstrained.
• Blank verse is unrhymed regular meter. Majority of English poetry.
• A stanza is a grouping of lines.
  • Rhyming couplet. A heroic couplet has rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter.
  • Quatrain
    • Ballad: ABAB.
    • Enclosed rhyme: ABBA.
    • Common metre or ballad metre: iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
    • Ballad stanza: common metre with ABCB rhyme.
• Forms
  • A sonnet is a quatorzain (fourteen line poem) with fixed rhyme.
  • A haiku has lines with 5, 7, and 5 syllables.
  • A limerick is an AABBA rhyme, with three-syllable A lines and 2-syllable B lines.
  • Choral ode is a song of praise. Strophe sung east to west, antistrophe reply sung west to east, and epode sung in unison.
  • An elegy is a serious reflection, usually a lament for the dead.
    • Elegiac couplet: dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter.
• End-stopped vs. enjambed lines.
• caesura is a pause in verse between phrases.

Rhetoric

• Three modes of persuasion: logos (reason), pathos (emotion), ethos (character or fundamental values)
• Four rhetorical operations: addition, omission, permutation, and transposition.

Literary device

• Types of irony
  • verbal irony: antiphrasis says the opposite of what is meant.
  • dramatic irony: audience knows what the characters don’t
  • cosmic irony: characters thwarted by fate.
• Auxesis (“increase”) or hyperbole
• Understatement or meiosis (“to diminish”) or litotes
• Plot device
  • deus ex machina
• Figure of speech
• Literary trope
  • Paradiastole reframes a vice as a virtue. “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!”
• Parechesis is the repetition of sound.
  • Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds.
    • Alliteration repeats initial consonant sounds
      • The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew / The furrow followed free
• Anaphora (“carrying back”) repeats words at the start of neighboring clauses.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric)
  • She’s imperfect, but she tries / She is good, but she lies.
• Anadiplosis (“double”) begins a clause with the end of a previous clause.
  • Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. -Yoda
• Epanadiplosis ends a clause with the beginning of a previous clause.
  • The king is dead, long live the king!
• Antimetabole reverses a grammatical structure with repeated words.
  • Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.
• Chiasmus reverses a grammatical structure without repeated words.
  • Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus
• Onomatopoeia is a word that sounds like its referent.
  • Animal noises like oink, moo, meow, roar, chirp, ribbit, croak, quack, woof.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia
• Pun or paronomasia is word play, a phrase with multiple meanings.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun
• Anagram
• Ambigram
• oxymoron
• palindrome

Pop Culture Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Appropriation_in_the_arts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature