Historical/Literary/Art Historical Eras and Representative Novels

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​Classical Antiquity: Ancient Greece & Rome (c. 600 BC – AD 500)  Key words for research: Classical Period

Greek OR Roman Novels/Plays/Epic Poems
Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound; Agamemnon
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex; Antigone
Euripides: Medea; Elektra
Aristophanes: Lysistrata
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Virgil: The Aeneid
Graves: I, Claudius; The Golden Ass
The Middle Ages (c. 500 - 1350)  Key words for research: Dark Ages, Medieval times, chivalry, The Crusades
 
Novels/Epic poems
Beowulf
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy
Joseph Bedier: The Romance of Tristan and Isolde (Iseut)
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron 
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Creysida
Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur
The Renaissance (c. 1350-1650)  Key words for research: Humanism, Elizabethan Era (1558-1603)
 
Novels/Epic poems/Plays
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote 
Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth ...
Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queen
The Age of Enlightenment (c. 1650-1780)  Key words: Neo-Classicism, The Age of Reason, The British Restoration
 
Novels
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Moliere: Le Tartuffe; Le Misanthrope
Voltaire: Candide
Milton: Paradise Lost
John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress
Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped; Treasure Island
Daniel DeFoe: Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
The Romantic Era (1780 -1890)  Key words for research: Romanticism, Gothic Literature
 
American Novels
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans    
Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Gothic Novels
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho    
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
French Novels
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables; The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers; The Count of Monte Cristo
Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Journey to the Center of the Earth    
Russian Novels
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina
The Victorian Era (1832-1870)  Key words for research: Victorianism, Puritanism, Colonialism
 
Novels
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Persuasion; Sense and Sensibility           
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities
William Makepiece Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Importance of Being Earnest
George Eliot: Silas Marner; Middlemarch
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbevilles; Far From the Madding Crowd  
The Modern Era (1890-1945) Key words for research: Edwardian Era, Modernism
 
Novels/Plays
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness; The Secret Agent
Herman Hesse: Siddhartha; Steppenwolf
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms; The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath; The Moon is Down; Of Mice and Men
E.M. Forster: A Room With a View; A Passage to India
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; The Wings of a Dove
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire; The Glass Menagerie
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Also novels by: Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Pasternak
The Post-Modern Era (1945-1979) Key words for research: Post-Modernism, theater of the absurd, magical realism, beat generation
Novels/Plays
​War / spy fiction
Alistair Maclean: H.M.S. Ulysses; The Guns of Navarone
James Michener: The Bridges at Toko-Ri; Hawaii; Tales of the South Pacific
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Terry Southern Dr. Strangelove (political satire)
Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal 

Drama
Graham Greene: Brighton Rock; The Power and the Glory; The End of the Affair 
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest
E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Margaret Atwood: The Edible Woman
J.D. Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
Alex Haley Roots
Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon
Joan Didion, Play it As It Lays
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice 
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
Truman Capote In Cold Blood
Richard Yates Revolutionary Road
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
​Science Fiction
​Arthur C. Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ​
​Nevil Shute On the Beach
Madeleine L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time
Ray Bradbury Farenheit 451

​
Philosophical
​Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead; Atlas Shrugged
​Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Beatnik/Boho
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Richard Brautigan Trout Fishing in America

Psychedelic
​William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch
Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

​Horror
​Stephen King The Shining, Carrie
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire 
​
​​Magical Realism
Gabriel Garcia de Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude